POEM #9: Yah Is My Shepherd
A new version of psalm 23
In my last essay, The Lily Archipelago, I began to describe a way of life which I consider the exact inverse of the “Gulag Archipelago” (Solzhenitsyn's metaphor for the sprawling network of Soviet forced labor camps, or gulags). Just as prisoners could be transported from one desolate gulag to another, as if the vast and beautiful forests between them didn't exist, so also The Lily Archipelago imagines a network of Christian temples and their satellites Christian homes, all immersed in abundant, Eucharistic gardens, as if the desolate concrete ocean of the Machine between them didn't exist.
And in that essay, I said this:
The original context of the Eucharist was the home! At its best, an expansive and secure home—for example, the Roman villa, as a microcosm of the universe, with its open-air gardens and refreshing pools of rainwater in its center—but still, the home: The scale of architecture and slow pattern of intimate, communal life which most nourishes the sense that yes, on Earth, we humans are at home.
To be truly at home, though, is “Every man under his own vine, his own fig tree” (Micah 4:4)—to be immersed in human-scale, human-nourishing gardens, where the cycles of growth and decay in nature, the cycles of sunlight and wind and rain, can be grasped in the cycles of one's own human body—where one can literally touch the Earth with one's body and, like Adam and Eve, who sprang from the dust of Eden like flowers themselves, participate directly in God's life-sustaining activities, as “animals who have received the vocation to become God” (Saint Basil of Caesarea)
Continuing to reflect on that, today I'm thinking of Psalm 23 – Yah Is My Shepherd. To my heart, this song portrays the close, intimate relationship between man and God which makes it possible for man to be at rest, at home among the green things of Earth.
As with the other psalm versions, this is pretty loose for a translation—the idea is mainly to recapture more or less the same sequence of vivid mental images that the original Hebrew roots would have conveyed—and for it to come out sounding like good poetry in English, too.
Let me know what you think!
love,
graham