Tim DeMay is a graduate student at the University of Maryland where he is pursuing a master's degree in fine arts (poetry.) You can read more of Tim's work on his website, The Town of Spring Once Again.

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At Easter, Poetry Helps Us Remember

by Tim DeMay 04-08-2012
Photo via Getty Images.

Photo via Getty Images.

Poetry is language made material.

It presents us with objects and the world, yes, that is part of its materiality, but it also – and perhaps fundamentally – makes our very language into a thing, rather than simply a medium. Like remembering that you exist in time, and becoming aware of your temporality, poetry takes what we are always immersed in and says, Remember; become aware.

Thus it is like all art a meditative practice. You must slow down, quiet yourself, and actively receive – a strange gesture, perhaps paradoxical, but one that is, if nothing else, prayer. And so for Holy Week, I want to present four (mostly) contemporary poems that can direct meditation without limiting it, that can engage prayer in our physical existence and the existence of the Resurrection as event, that can slow one down, that can build sensual memory of the acts we do and life we live in constant remembrance of it, of Him.