Wrapped Around Hope

Wrapped Around Hope

(“For I will be merciful toward their evil deeds, and their sins I will remember no longer.” Hebrews 8:12)

You could not have timed it any better,
the fates aligned, and the angels faced the
future with their eyes as fierce as tigers.
Too many gave up taking themselves all
too
seriously.
We live with pain, pounded by the past
and fooled by the future. We look for answers
to manufacture gods in our own image.
Signing on the dotted line, we expect to be
charged with misdemeanors and felonies,
admitting our criminality, feeling like guilt
with shame running down our chins. We hoped
we would be better by now.

We memorized every misstep,
memorialized each sin.
We sat on Santa’s lap knowing we would
never deserve what we’d asked for.

Still,
we wrapped ourselves around hope.
We tried to elope before the wedding began.
We tried to leave early from the annual board meeting.
We wanted to hide away because people always save
the harshest words for the conclusion. What we need
is benediction;
what we hide are the contradictions that drive us
into undercover dungeons.

Yet,
the light is washing away the cobwebs,
the morning is inviting the lost and lonely,
the afternoon is singing songs set free,
the evening invites a quiet contemplation.
And the angels turn their faces toward the
sun as we watch them glorify the one who
opened the skies for us well before we gave up
all our vices.

Get Over It

 

Get Over It

(“So Lot chose the region around the Jordan for himself. Lot headed out toward the east, and they separated from each other.” Genesis 13:11)

They tell me to get over it,
they tell me to repent. The voices die
at night and
live again the
next day. They tell me there is a price
to pay. Get over it, like downshifting in the
passing lane. Get over it, though the embers are still
fanned into flame.

They tell me I have lost my way,
they tell me I’ve gone off the deep end.
They point out I chose the left
when I should have veered right all along.
I never minded where I lived,
I just needed the voices to cease that
ad-libbed their sermons on the back of broken hearts.

I searched for the invisible, sought and knocked
time and time again. I looked for the unseen soul
who knew pain as deeply as I; pain that rarely
is over.
I ached for ancient friends and sighed for enlightenment.
I cried alone under wooden pews,
I needed more than one visitor who would refuse
to accuse the location of my pain.

Get over it, the perfidy of imperfect lenses
could have been truer with more pauses and
less past-tense.

I was bloated with small talk, so I doted on
children’s chalk drawings. (They never left me
baffled by their silence.) For all the grinding of time
my head aches and
my heart breaks
over causes yet to be determined.

But today there were daisies,
today there were jonquils,
today there were poppies and
the sweetest nicknames for friends.

But today I’m washing in the ocean of love divine;
I’m bathing in the motion of earth and sky.
I hear the bells ringing the angels’ song
and miss a few who used to listen to the waterfalls
without defining their time or place.

Around the Greening Campfire

 

Around the Greening Campfire

(“But God has shown me that I must not call any person common or unclean.” Acts 10:28b)

Dreams come cleaner around the greening campfire;
splayed out in a dozen sleeping bags, our heads a ring around
the waning embers
and our legs the rays of a star being born.

We told our stories round-robin, past midnight till dawn.
Some of us knew each other since childhood,
some we had met only hours ago.
Some were impatient to sleep with day-sting in their eyes,
the rest insisted the night couldn’t end until we saw the sunrise.

All we knew was this moment would never come again;
these twelve never gathered, this fire a different color on
another planet or
another day.
We were attached to each other by the web of our voices,
the stories a silken thread stitching us like a firefly’s smoking jacket.

Some of us had seen the aurora borealis just the night before,
and swore
God was speaking on the mountain trail we snuck upon
well after curfew. We smoked cigarettes and held them in
the air like votive candles.

But the breathing fire that was our center; the mass that was
equidistant from each of us seemed touchable that night (though
none of us thought to hold an ember in our hand.) We were
baby birds learning each other’s languages, a tired menagerie
in the Sierra Nevadas, just a handful of whelps from the East Bay.

We have flared from there in every direction, as different as
we were the same that night. But the threads still contain us,
the night still calls us, and the stories are written upon the sky
in the hearts of stars that hid our chatter and occasional tears
in eternal vaults. No one is ever unmet.

More Hemmed In

More Hemmed In

(“As the mountains are around Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people, from now and forever.” Psalm 125:2)

I’m sick with pain.
I no longer hurt, no mere aches,
but am diseased and broken,
a brain that has flown off the tracks.

Where are the ones who once walked with me,
Am I a leper unclean?
Where are the ones who broke bread with me,

Am I repulsive; or worse,
unseen?

You throw your words like shards of glass,
broken beer bottles ready for a street fight.
You disguise yourself until the last moment
and retreat into the words you learned in church
(but you forgot the Sunday School songs (Jesus
loves the little children of the world.)

I’m shattered with pain,
scratching at a heart that will not heal.
Numb and frozen in place my head nods sleepily
filled with shots of lead.
The avenues are blocked, I cannot see ahead,
more friends decide I am not worth their time.

And, what if I disagree with the new few who
smile at me,
occasionally? What if they find I am not nearly
one of their kind
as they supposed
me to be?

So, God you say you surround me, but I feel more
hemmed in than
protected.
You’ve put the squeeze on me, I’m the last dollops
of toothpaste in the tube.

So, God you say you surround me, my brain is broken,
so perhaps the arrows the fly through wireless eyes,
are angels come to rescue me.

Sounds are uncertain and sight is deceiving,
I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve been down this road before.

So, God you say you surround me.