Our Long Journey

Our Long Journey

(“Won’t God give justice to his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” Luke 18:7a)

It felt like we had stood in line
for more than the circumference of time.
The asphalt melted our feet,
the tears evaporated in the heat,
the rush of muddy water, the river, the boundary
between journey and sojourn,
was our salvation, or our final destination.
We cried out for days to heads of state
whose ears were tickled by impoverished views of
unwashed throngs who left footprints behind them
a thousand miles long.

We immersed ourselves in suffering, we did not choose it.
We crossed horizons, we crawled when the canyons fell
below us. The songs caught up to us; we moved slowly enough
to carry them in our chests like anthems and amens,
the beginning and end of our petitions for
a hearing before we reached the border line.

There were rainbows hiking with us, the colors proud
as we took them into our fold. There were eunuchs and
pagans,
priests and variations of supplication. There were the
silent. There were the opalescent. There were the angry,
the defeated, the determined, the babies, the children,
the ancestors and all the rest. We all were seeking
a place among
the rising tide we were promised by the ancient
declarations,
the independent proclamations,
the handbills dropped from the sky that promised
a rebirth of unity.

It felt like we had stood in line
far longer than the foundations of nations
that fancied themselves beacons upon hills.
It felt like we would be waiting until a greater
Justice
would be our Advocate. We waited, and knew,
if only micro-dots per day, soon or late, we would know
slowly
our long journey was no longer wandering. Our long
journey
was stumbling upon the
New
Creation.

All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

(“That’s why the spring was called, ‘The Well of the Living One who Looks after Me.’” Genesis 16:14a)

He side-stepped into town; didn’t want his face to be seen.
He stepped over every crack, carried dried bread in his pockets.
He was from another country, he rarely heard his own language.
His face was crusted like a coal miner’s map. He never liked
being watched. He would step into the shadows. He never liked
being asked where he was from, or how he got to where he was.
Every road was different, every meal the same. All he wanted was
silence.
All he wanted was to know his name.
He watched for movement behind the trees, limbs that moved against
the breeze. He listened for snapping twigs, for whispers, for a
stray dog’s bark, or perhaps the sun and shadow colliding just ahead.
No one knew him. No one ever did. He moved through time,
past tilting billboards, around rail stations abandoned like scarecrows
in the desert.
He read every cloud. He rehearsed every line of the day. He memorized
all he had forgotten from the day before.
Suspended in the space between nearly and always,
he rarely stopped. The future was inevitable. Dust devils
were the only messengers of god he knew.

Then his luck ran out. His tank was empty. His feet curled in on themselves,
his brain sought the solace of shade and croaking frogs beside a
farmer’s duck pond. He let his guard down. He let the spare breath
he had
form words he feared. He saw the eyes that saw him. He saw the feet
moving gently along the bank. He heard the voice, light and translucent,
that only said (he shivered)

I see you.

It was a child’s voice. They were darting eyes that saw everything. They
came from the sky and the dandelions at the same time, these eyes that
belonged to everyone. And he let his breath go to

Fill the void he had left behind him.

Just Outside Your Gated Community

Just Outside Your Gated Community

(“Child, remember that during your lifetime you received good things, whereas Lazarus received terrible things. Now Lazarus is being comforted and you are in great pain.” Luke 16:25b)

It is the worst kind of danger to hear the beggar at the door and
keep on eating your lamb chops and your double chocolate cake, all washed down
with tankards of champagne.
It is the heinous dis-hearing. It is the disheartened ignorance. It is the
fourth story suite that makes the silence complete. You know he is there,
but now you cannot hear his cries of hunger. You can only see the dogs
licking his open wounds while you suck the repast’s grease from your fingers.
You have saturated your blood vessels so completely that
your fine dining will leave you dying within months. A change in menu
might solve
your issues and his.
But you turn the music up louder, the songs from your teens that once
meant everything to you. A forgotten love. An easy day along the sea.
A comrade in arms when you lived on rations and hunted rabbits to
supplement your meager provisions. It was sport for you. You never knew
true hunger.

But he does, just outside your gated community. Didn’t someone tell you
about him?
Did you dismiss him as just another vagrant trying to make a buck without
putting in a single day’s work?

I saw him yesterday, just a block from your home. His eyes were bright,
his gait was labored, his breath was shallow and he winced with every step.
He was relentless. Life and death could happen within the same moment
for him.
I gave him what I had and hoped you would give him more from you
monstrous stores.

The next day I rang at your gate. I hoped to placate the antimony
that had taken the place of your heart. They told me you were gone,
your residence was empty, your soul was somewhere below.

I wished no harm to you. But damn it! He did not need to die:
And you could have seen to that.
But damn it! You did not need to die, and he could have helped
with that.

Live awhile in the flames of your choices. He is comforted as never before.
One day the kingdom may redraw the designs we think prove that we
have it all.

Stand outside your gate before it is too late. Learn his name. The one he
has now. Not the one before he had a face.
Listen to his story. You may both find your thirst quenched
this side of death.

The Day Started Well Enough

The Day Started Well Enough

(“No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You aren’t able to serve God and Mammon.” Luke 16:13)

The day started well enough; the sun rose
in the usual place. The grass was unruly around
the dog’s pen and
the garden beds where two rose bushes struggle.
I would have waited all day for your company,
even if you got a late start. With a porch swing in front
and a deck on the back,
my house is yours. No need to build another one.
There is music even before you arrive,
you send it ahead of you. There are memories
of the way your eyes dance at birds and clouds,
but mostly babies.
There are evenings with campfires
that should never be extinguished.
There are places where no words need be spoken.
The day starts the same for you and me,
and I know you desire for it to end more quietly.
We can pick up the sunshine with plastic shovels
and store it in pails we sometimes used for Easter baskets.
We can toss it toward night-sky imaginations and laugh
at our ingenuity. We have lassoed the sun.
Eden was a paradise I am told,
but so is my back yard. And no tree is forbidden;
the rabbits come for breakfast, the deer brunch on the
unprotected roses.

These are all yours. They do not belong to me.
I’ve kept a journal in the desk by the front window.
You can write in it every time you come, and no one will know.

The day started. They all do. We remembered; we knew.
We wondered when the boy would come finish mowing the lawn.
Then we would gather the sunlight, drop it like jewels into the
glowing embers of our campfire, and tell stories we only tell
each other. 

What The Hoopla was About

What The Hoopla was About

(“Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.” Luke 15:20b)

It was completely unexpected. Servants scurried to buy balloons
and helium tanks. Chefs stewed, smoked, and roasted all the stores
on the farm.
The musicians were lined up, setting their equipment on a flat-bed truck,
still uncertain what the hoopla was all about.

The father’s eyes drooped as days went on. His tears dropped like
rain on the dust around his sandals. He worked his horses hard.
He carried both a burden and diamond of reflections he knew were
brighter than the weeks he had endured. When a son leaves a father,
the rooms are silent; there are gaps in the stories around the dinner table.

The father was not angry. But a son was lost, a boy was dead, and
would found and alive fix anything at all?

He measured his gaze from the porch to the end of the field. He took
the place of a sentry in the warming morning leading till noon. Was their
a dust trail on the horizon? Was there a voice that would make his heart
spin again? When you love deeply you lose nothing though your son has
moved outside the circumference of time. Love is held in reserve,
or how shall the party be ready if all we do is forget?

A certain day, it is difficult to know it precisely, there came a shadow
up the road. There came a boy with shoulders hunched over. There came a
son
who did not think he should be a son. There came a boy who thought
he should be a slave.

Fathers know none of that nonsense. Mothers bake bread every day in hopes
the runaway will show up, sneaking in the screen door from the back porch.

This is love, this sprinting embrace. This is love, this kissing of the face.
This is love, this father, son, son, mother, though not all enjoyed the party.
This is love that surrenders

To foolish shenanigans and brings the children home.

I Want to Lay Down Pretense

I Want to Lay Down Pretense

(“And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:27)

I want to lay down pretense,
I want to carry nothing with me but the way
truth and love chase the shadows away.
I want to be the old man on the porch who
children come to see. I want to hear about the
new baby, the goal they made in soccer, their first crush,
their questions about leaves in the wind and branches that
break overnight next to their window.
I am too full of stories. I am I too many. I am lately
a receiver with no need to broadcast
what I have heard,
what I have learned,
what I think are the deepest concerns an
old man
should have.

I want to lay down attraction,
I want to exist like clouds pregnant with shade.
I want to listen to silence and let it be the only
healing I need.
I want to be the old man with his dog
who stops to speak to a woman bent with age,
clutching her cane,
carrying shopping bags that pull her closer to
the ground. I want to touch her sun-painted arm
spotted like bark and say something that makes her
feel lighter.

I do not want to fight for attention.

I want to be the white-haired man whose age is
still to be determined. Though mirrors do not lie (but
they do, those 2-dimensional scoundrels) I want the
humor of a teenager,
the wonder of a toddler,
and a day when, though nothing happens,
I find love is always enough to
fill my heart with one more breezy conversation.

Bound By No Passage of Time

Bound By No Passage of Time

(“It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the sky nested in its branches.” Luke 13:19)

Borne by diagonal blues
my heart often refuses the comfort of
sun or memories.
I do not delight in inner images,
mere ghosts cannot sit beside me in the afternoon.
I never know if it is chemicals, or misfiring synapses,
or base ungratefulness,
but the pressure pushes tears out past my cheeks again.

To believe the world is absurd at only
a third of your lifespan may be center ring
and second act clowning.
But in the final third it leaves the robin’s song
unheard until they rest for the nested night.

There are words I once knew like soul/breath,
multiple choice answers, true/false tests, clarity.
But I could not discount the unrest,
the whirlpools that unseated the certainties
of invisible habitations. There was no architecture
designed for my peace of mind.

But if you fall, if you are buried by time
bone by bone,
I will find the color yellow and focus toward you
until you bloom again.
I will sit, the saddened, and rehearse the stories we
only tell
until it is too late.
Or the stories we tell family they have heard dozens
of times before,
but coyly confess to never knowing.

But my muscles still strangle me like missing a trapeze
high above the circus tent. My memories sometimes displace
the shoveled dirt but
more often invade my dreams with caricatures, with
mongrels of my own making who have forgotten everything
about dew-cooled meadows midsummer.

I admit there should be more pastels here, portraits that
should have reminded me of your face. But I stub my toe
on sand,
trip myself again and again.
Though I still wave hello to the past,
I will flag down the next possible invitation
to a comfortable couch,
ice cold beer
and a room where the robins,
the rabbits,
the tie-dye shirts and
jangly bracelets
inhabit a house bound by no
passage of time at all.

Underneath the Eaves

Underneath the Eaves

(“Our people should also learn how to set an example by doing good things when urgent needs arise so that they can live productive lives.” Titus 3:14)

Underneath the eaves of yesterday’s lectures
there must be something left to do. I’ve studied hard,
finals are upon us,
but my pencil to the paper hasn’t fed my neighbor yet.
In my time I’ve listened to four thousand sermons,
and I’ve read the bible like a merry-go-round.
But all those notes in the margins haven’t
never wrapped the wounds of the kid next door.

Next time, please leave us with instructions to the
ghettos of our minds. Please help us deconstruct our trajectory
that takes us round and round mountains piled with objections
to every dissenting view. We argue and think
God
is pleased.
We plant our evidence and extinguish the incense
that might have brought us to our knees.

We once cleared the mud from a church’s parking lot,
the result of monsoon floods. Teens with shovels and
wheelbarrows scraped the asphalt bare so the door could open
for the Next Sunday’s sermons and prayers.
I would rather have cleared the driveways from houses of God
where widows lived,
where addicts sighed,
where destitute cried,
where the sun left old bodies drying in overheated living rooms,
and
where the floods and sun left little to recover.

Underneath the piles of mud we dumped into the
woods behind the church,
grass pushed through. We could have planted gardens
for the smaller homes. We could have landscaped hope
house to house to house.

I Don’t Mean to Question You

I Don’t Mean to Question You

(“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you a kingdom.” Luke 12:32)

I don’t mean to question you, but I will.
Where is the flock, the kingdom, the pleasure, the joy?
Where are the carousels that once made me dance?
Where are the voices that used to elicit my laughter,
where is the treasure I thought my heart sought after?

I’m locked inside my body again,
my brain refuses the sun. The sentences I used to underline,
now are gibberish, a language from another time.
The songs I waggled on keys of black and white
pass through me like icicles of steam. The spark is
dead,
the embers are
cold,
and I waste time like I had years
that will never end.

All my mistakes are on repeat,
all my joys are dead weight,
all my complaints are deaf,
my thoughts squashed by rules that
that I’ve broken and paid for, from curios to
curiosity. I’ve shackled my words to avoid
conflagrations.
I’ve handcuffed my sentences and simply hope
that someone can read my moods. I’ve muted
so much
that I forget half the alphabet. Do I overstate it?

No

Even as I write I edit. I apologize, but days like this
feel like
dying. I hate sleight of hand; I would never deceive you.
But I can’t reveal too much for fear of driving yet another
beloved one away.

Don’t promise me heaven. Just stop with that shit. Don’t
promise me
no more tears
like I need a baby shampoo.
I want a garden here in my back yard,
not a paradise in the clouds.

How can anyone understand when my own
thoughts defy translation? Pain is a trap,
a snare in the forest.
Pain is a mind like a cauldron
boiling with an iron lid around its neck.

Did I say I don’t mean to question? Did I lie?
Pity is not the antibiotic I need,
tranquility is overrated.
But as people have been subtracted from me,
no one has been added.

I’m locked inside the pain again,
and chained to all my secrecy.
I am not finished.
I shall write again tomorrow.

I Have No More Speeches

I Have No More Speeches

(“Woe to you lawyers as well! For you load people with burdens that are hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.” Luke 11:46)

The path is not steeper but
my steps have grown slower.
My dreams are now erasures of
things that once were second nature.
I no longer draw people with my words,
I see them leave upon the first stroke of the painting.
I try to pray at the end, a benediction, and bow to
tie blessings to bodies that wander like planets.
I did not reach “amen”. I quit halfway through.

We met in catacombs, a basement with rooms like
honeycombs. I had been there often where antique books
and furniture
could be found in every alcove. This time all was removed
except for the corners. It was now a labyrinth.

I let you down. I ran out of breath. I remembered every stubbed toe,
every stumble that was the death of the next thing that I carried
like an obligation. Some saw and carried me further.
Some heard and only guessed. I knew. And could not
lay the burden of dying to rest.

There were eyes of unseen guests; they may have been there
from the beginning. The only ones I remember were the
tears that came from all the pain of dragging their war chest
so far up the mountain.

I exhale and sit on a gray concrete block. I cannot
cry. I am shaky and flushed and wish there was a spinet piano
to hide behind. This climb has not refined me, it has subtracted
layers of flesh from my feet and years of conquest from my soul.

I have no more speeches within me. My prayers have come to an end.
I’ll move outside the hallowed basement and
hope for the joy of finally
not being seen.

Spotlight on the Dandelions

Spotlight on the Dandelions

(“No one takes a light and puts it under a bowl or hides it. Instead, he puts the light on a lampstand so that the people who come in can see.” Luke 11:33)

Spotlight on the dandelions,
the unusual manes that push toward the sun.
The petals, tiny and golden, are imperfect like
the best artwork. Embellishing cracks in the sidewalk,
ants crawl past them and dig tunnels below their stretching
roots.
They smell like lawns after spring’s first mowing. They rarely
catch our attention, but they have so much to show.
They draw the secrets of the soil through opalescent stems
and wait for the next late-night thunderstorm to shake them awake.
And wait for the next rising of the sun to bid them rise
and shine.
Who knew they also make a delicate wine?
Some neighbors pluck them like weeds.
Some children ignore them playing with puppies.
They are disorderly invaders to some and
inspiration for a toddler’s bouquet presented to Mom.

Sit with one for an hour,
count the petals, caress the jagged leaves.
Listen to the freshening breeze and watch it
sway atop its sturdy stem. Does it remind you of
a picnic with a lover,
a wildwood meadow,
time without measure,
length without answers?

How many wishes have been granted as they
end their life cycle as flying pods of seeds?
How old were you when you wised upon your first one,
and how old shall you be when you blow the dandelion seeds
toward a distant reverie?

We Had to Pause

We Had to Pause

(“The Lord God is my strength. He will give me feet like a deer and make me leap along the high hills.” Habakkuk 3:19)

The pace slowed as the day grew longer,
the sprints stole our breath. We were ivy
learning to climb. Taught to keep time by
the beat of rushing headlines we were worn
out from
chasing deadlines that killed our wonder.

We had to pause.
We took meals cooked by campfire,
we drank streams slowly as we dissolved into
the slower tempo of mountain hikes.
We had to waves as faces became clearer
becoming fascinated by freckles, hairlines, and
cheeks streaked with mud. We wanted to
memorize the eyes that saw us, record the way
they translated stillness into passion.

We had to hear.
And that meant dismantling stadiums full of
applause, raiding the meadows to steal a
song so unrehearsed we finally felt human.
We were the lucky ones who happened to cry
when stumbling on sounds, when doves whispered
and babies cooed.

When our breath slowed we could listen between
the beats of our heart. When our feet hurt we learned
to stop and tell stories before the next bend on the trail.

Put On Another Log

Put On Another Log

(“And so I remind you to stir up the gift of God that is in you…” 1 Timothy 1:6)

Don’t watch me burn.
Sit by the fire and warm your hands.
Pick up a guitar.
Wink at the girl across from you.
Tap your feet in the blackened soot.
Sing the song on the top of the sky.
Repeat the words that first made you fly.
Tell the story,
please tell it again.
Tell the story we have heard a hundred times before.
Show us how you memorized it,
or how your grandfather revised it generations ago.
Point out the constellations, I can never get the right.
Big Dipper. Little Dipper. North Star. Pleiades. Obscured by the
lights from town.
Pass out the wine you found on the final excursion
to the vineyards last fall. Do you have Dandelion,
and can we share?

Put on another log, we want to stay until early morning.
The stack is at the back of the property, dried, I hope,
after winter rains.
Teach us the song we’ve forgotten, let the blues harp
take the lead. The toddlers are dancing in shadows of the flames,
the teens are hoping to kiss for the first time tonight.
It is late spring and the air is cool. There are extra
sweatshirts inside the shed. The smell of last autumn’s
smoke still clings to sleeves and hoods.
A dad in plaid is shaving sticks of their bark and
handing them to kids with hot dogs in their hands.
Later we will burn some marshmallows, the embers will glow
blue and orange,
one baby is cuddling with her head on the side of the new
black Labrador puppy.
One is nestled in Auntie’s arms, eyelids are slow semaphores
as sleep pulls him close.

The fire, we kept it fanned. We planned for a few, and more than
that
stayed quiet and late. In the morning we will wash down the night
with coffee for the handful who never went home.