God-With-Us

(a little late in the season, but I've been mega-busy!)

God-With-Us

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall give birth to a son. They shall call his name ‘Immanuel’; which is, being interpreted, ‘God with us.’” Matthew 1:23

Have you ever awoken from one of the dreams that seems so real that it influences your mood for a good part of the day? You may not even remember all the details, but the mood, the emotions stick with you. It is not that you simply remember feeling sad or happy, you still are sad or happy. Perhaps you actually dreamt about someone you knew, and somehow you have the same feelings toward the person once you are awake that you had in the dream. Having dreamed you have upset a loved one, you wonder what you have done to make them angry. And you keep telling yourself, “Self, it was only a dream.”

The Shortest Sentences

The Shortest Sentences

(”He took the seven loaves of bread and the fish and gave thanks to God. Then he divided the food and gave it to his followers, and they gave it to the people.” Matthew 15:36)

And the plains rolled slowly from the feet of the hills,
westward and looking, gazing and turning the questions upon themselves
over and over again. The crowd filled the grass,
every blade bent or broken. There is hunger here. There is thirst
and desire. There is aging hope, and fame sinking down the drains
of earlier expectations. The antique prophets spoke,
the burnished teachers with sparkling swag turned the thunder
to cuss and spit and anger. The wrath of God, in their hands,
was just the politics of borders.

But new and older, without a place to lay his head,
another spoke with patina. Our hunger deepened, our thirst
a dry and violent hole cracked well past autumn. Yet, the

shortest sentence fills us like banquets.

The slightest promise

Coaxes rain from the empty skies,
and empties our eyes of a life-full of precipitation.

We crossed the borders and He knew us,
we marched with refugees on the sands of worn leather,
arriving later than we had planned,
the party must have ended,
the budget overspent,
with only the roadies left behind packing up the
double-bass and banjos.  We doubled our pace

And discovered

There is not late, no ever, there is not there, nor never,
only fullness and every hungry for more.

Wide for Two

Wide for Two

(“God’s way is perfect. All the Lord’s promises prove true. He is a shield for all who look to him for protection.” Psalm 18:30)

Think there beside me, there are no strangers,
we are not alone. You are too sweet to die by
lying words. Hear truth, the two-edged sword of
bright hues and life.

This is your destiny that calls you, speaks your name so softly you
hear each syllable peal like the
morning chimes through fog.

You are created; love and power, and a thirst unquenched.
A satiated heart, filled with its own words and senses, never
discover the colossal passion of the
hunger that only cries,

“More, my Lord. And never let
my eyes
become accustomed to the hues You create
for my daily plate, the divine nourishment
of love.”

Though the world conspires to clothe you only
with cast-offs, you have the same brown overcoat
daddy and grand-dad wore. Swaddled in the
well-worn lining ancestral discoveries mingle
with future longings and hope takes fire

Lit by prophetic miles, wide for two, and long
enough for all.

You Speak to Me

You Speak to Me

(“Then he (Jesus) went up on a mountain where he could be alone and pray. Later that evening, he was still there.” Matthew 14:23)

I don’t think I could stay there all night,
in fact, I tried once, and ended up eating donuts before dawn.
There is so much power,
so much I could tell if only I could keep my feet
on the final swell from midnight till daylight.
I don’t know why I could not stay longer
with the one who,
I don’t know why,
loved me. But my mind is a prison

Of carousels and mosquitos that demand my attention.
I could excuse my thinnest moments on Your invisibility,
yet I can imagine the length and breadth of love or passion,
debates and conversations that never end. Arguments I’ll
never resolve
play merry-go-round, beginning, end, middle and then
starting someplace or other again. And the insects gnaw at
my best intentions; buzzing like radar, stinging like zeroes
and biting the truth in two.

Yet the moments when, at last, the mechanics of my mind
brake uphill and stop turning, when the gates have closed and
all conversation ceases, the quiet is dense as chocolate cream.
Frightening silence when half a newspaper, swirled by the breeze,
interrupts my reverie. The moments when the firing neurons
take their nap and leave my tiny spirit alone, the whisper of truth
which had hovered there all along, takes me hostage untethered
to a hiding place of lucidness, a cavern lit from within;

Those are when, a minute, an hour now hardly matter. For
I have heard the words I quivered to know,
thought myself unworthy to know,
and bow down, or leap up, or walk about or seek the star;
all are the delight of the solitary moments when
You speak to me. 

Until No One

Until No One

(“The sacred vestments of Aaron shall be passed on to his sons after him; they shall be anointed in them and ordained in them.” Exodus 29:29)

I know you want the title,
I heard you’ve been renamed.
You’re the prophet who can change
any ashes that have remained from
the fire we burned last night in the hearth
where we stare at the flames till midnight.
No one blames them for going cold after so long.

But the positions we inherit, the ranks we desire
do not fit us in our longings for something deeper,
something higher, something wiser than the mere headdress
of a priest at his duties,
or the half-Windsor knot of an executive’s silk tie,
we lie to other who know the truth,
we lie to ourselves and remain unmoved.

From the stars whose light fascinates our eyes,
from nebulae and galaxies we pretend to be our playgrounds,
the deepest call, (a Servant’s appellation), lands within our ears
quicker than light from iron-cold stars.

Fasten the nametag now, do not hesitate, serve the meal
with the wine
and take your place among
those who have heard you were once a criminal
or worse.

Today is your choice, today is the final verse of an Amen
louder than the last sound from the first black hole; listen now
to the level ground, the Father’s Son laid everything down

And kicked up the dust he first created so some would
lay down their crowns
to follow, thirsty, through the desert, until no one
knows our name.

We Send Prophecies

We Send Prophecies

("Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Matthew 12:30)

We make up names we found on scraps scattered on the ground,
torn edges of old poetry at an old author’s feet.
We rewrite the majesty, we make it fit for the streets,
but by the time we get there the houses are apartments,
the playmates have retired, and the grade-school hallways are
oh so much smaller than they were when we began.

We formulate the ways to eternity, we bake pies without recipes
and all along we sing the songs we heard from Mawmaw’s kitchen,
and wish she was still here to sing them.

We master-mind life’s navigation, steering past the last field
still cracking with marigolds and golden poppies. Next week
they break ground on the next Jacuzzi factory, mowing the
fair-haired garden down.

We send prophecies in the mail, we memorize the fictional apocalypse
seen through the latest novelist’s insistent of inerrancy. We study
multi-million dollar platforms and borrow a few thousand for
our daydreams. We turn a blind eye, (with misty recitations
explaining the third eye to a world lately myopic), we turn
the blinded eye toward the borders where refugees camp

And use the other eye to measure the miles per gallon
on the Winnebago we will ride cross country, freer than
the sky.

We make up names, we toss out the claims that Jesus could be
the Perfect Son and mean His sayings. We make him up; an angel,
an uncle, a poet, a hippie, a renegade, a god, a villain,
a vigilante, a brother, the other side of Cohen or Dylan,

But to bow in trembling unknowing is beyond our graphite ways.
We insist upon 8 and a half by 11, or we will not believe the dimensions
of Might and Compassion that cannot be worded except in the beginning
and incarnate among flesh and blood.

Dreamed-Up

Dreamed-Up

(“Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them. We will come to them and make our home with them.’” John 14:23)

She woke up and thought she would write some words
to the one person she had refused her words for
five years and more. And then the words were only
the sudden hope of manufactured miracles,
the quick passing of canned words strengthened by seeing
it

All in a dream.

While he had suffered for seven years, the pain building
like a slow ascent up a Mexican pyramid, or the steep hills
you hike
that appear as one short jaunt until sightlines break the ridge
to see
more and more hills ahead; and in your periphery. More hills that
eventually end upon a plateau of pain; a restless place where

Each day drowns you underneath its angry intent of
shoving every thought out of a once active brain,
and your habits are soggy and sweat from the energy consumed
attempting to beat back the welding pen that has engraved “pain”
upon every movement of your body.

But she (who could challenge her motives) merely sent a “word”
that dreamed up a prophetic announcement that all his pain would
be finished soon.

And he would like an ear, for she would not bear to hear that, in a month
or a year,
the season had remained, the pain still plunging him helplessly
beyond anyone’s comprehension

Except God’s alone.