Hope Hidden in Cut Grass

There’s a bleak poem by Philip Larkin titled Cut Grass. Here it is:

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

It’s a brutal reflection on death at peak summer and we can’t help but feel a foreboding, as though the metaphor was made for us. We spring up, then we’re cut down—and that for a long, long time. Perhaps forever.

The Scriptures, not ducking reality by affirming the brevity of life and stalking death, yet offers us a glimmering hope amid the grass. 1 Peter 1:22-25:

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God;  for

“All flesh is like grass
    and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
    and the flower falls,

 but the word of the Lord remains forever.”

And this word is the good news that was preached to you.”

How shall we respond as gospel people? Live with all your might at early summer. For death is not a bottomless chasm. But even if we’re cut down tomorrow, we have the promise that we’ll be replanted in a world remade!