John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

We’ve always got the Dales

A harvest poem in troubled times

 

Harvest gives perspective

On this troubled world we’re in

A world, some say, in chaos 

While others speak of sin

 

There is so much anxiety

On the direction where we’re going

There is so much uncertainty

No easy way of knowing

 

So it’s good to get together here

With family and friends

To mark another season

As another harvest ends

 

And think just how much stronger

People are together

Holding each other closely

Through every kind of weather

 

And consider how creation

Keeps us together too

How lambing, seedtime, harvest

Bring life to me and you

 

So in these days where questions

Round every corner meet us

Let’s not let Brexit worries

Weigh on us and defeat us

 

Harvest gives us trust

In wider, deeper things

In each other, in the eternal

Those things which make us sing

 

Prorogation, segregation, 

Whatever else prevails

We’ve always got each other and 

We’ve always got the Dales

 

John Davies

14 September 2019

Keasden Harvest Supper

What is the force that drives nature?

John’s Notes: Parish Newsletter editorials

September 2019

What is the force that drives nature? What makes flowers flourish, what is the creative force causing health and growth in the crops and creatures we celebrate at Harvest time? It’s a mystery to us - which maybe only poetry can express. 

Dylan Thomas explored this mystery in his classic verse, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. In it he makes deep connections between himself and the force behind nature: whilst keenly aware of how his mortality also disconnects him from that force and from the rest of nature:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees 

Is my destroyer. 

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose 

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. 

Thomas (aged 19 when he wrote) says: there is a force behind nature. But ‘I am dumb’ to express it, I can¹t explain it, in my earthbound, death-bound body I can’t quite grasp it. 

No lack of certainty, however, from the poet who wrote Psalm 104. ‘Praise the Lord, my soul. … The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent… He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind… He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.’ Observant Jews begin each day’s worship with these words.

Harvest can be a bit of a mystery to us in its invitation to us to find ways to give thanks for the force that drives nature, to celebrate the creative force which makes us, the crops and creatures grow. Harvest prompts us to consider how closely we ourselves are tied into nature and its cycles. How we are members of ‘the Community of Creation’ (a phrase of Richard Bauckham) alongside every other creature and plant and element on earth.

Whether we feel confident to name the force that drives nature, or speechless at this mystery, Harvest invites us to spend time wondering about it.