I missed the annual posting of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday on Ash Wednesday last year, but we’re back on schedule this year. I usually post the last section because it has the best rhythm (and “smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth” is just so fun to say), but I think my favorite passage is at the end of the second section:
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.