Bury Your Idols

 Bury Your Idols

(“The Lord God is my strength. He will set my feet like the deer. He will let me walk upon the heights.” Habakkuk 3:19)

Tonight more blood stains the streets
while the entitled
use our children for target practice.
Tonight more mothers cry to the sky
helpless as
ducks in a shooting gallery.
Tonight more people
used their rights
to suspend righteousness and
pave the footprints of cowardice;
oh people of pretense, get on your
feet and walk where too many have fallen.

Look in the caskets.
A long, painful, life-shattering look at
what the masters of violence have wrought.
Can you still identify them by their faces,
can you?
Can you tell who died first or last,
or who never saw it coming?
Can you, just this once, learn the sculpture,
the art,
the hard, fucking casualties of your
complacency?

Don’t tell me how high you have walked.
I want to know, has enough blood soaked your
sneakers? Has enough flesh been torn from
bony limbs, enough bodies ripped to shreds?

Don’t tell me you’ll pray. Don’t say it.
Don’t tell me God is your strength
if you’re too weak
to turn your hellish idol into garden
tools.
Don’t tell me how much it haunts you;
get off your pious ass and learn the ways of
the Spirit, the Mother, the Daughter,
the One attacked from womb to Golgotha
with the weapons of institutional anger.

I can’t stand to see another fundraiser,
I will not let your group wash my car.
I can’t stand to see another shirt that proclaims
devilish schemes in the name of
the one who rains on the just, the unjust,
the crust and the bread. Cry

Out.

Raise your voice. Speak up. Loudly.
The voices from sod and pavement
will not wait for you to call another vigil.
Find the words from the
God

Who refused violence, who died for friends,
foes, dust and the earth.

Bury your idols and
let the children live.

Do Not Distract Me

 

Do Not Distract Me

(“Do not turn to idols or make gods of cast metal for yourselves; I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19:4)

Somewhere in the distant past a nearby star
exploded to give the universe cosmic relief,
and left these rocks strewn along the river
sunning on the banks beneath my feet.

The flat ones are good for skipping,
I’ve practiced since I was a kid
and made them jump twelve times or more
before I dove in for a swim.

Others built cairns, starting with the larger ones,
balancing one course and then the next. A minaret in
miniature, a monument, an altar.
I do not know who laid these so precisely,
hunting each stone to complete the work.

I confess I have not built one; but found, they
silence me. Patience and quiet along the river,
beside the trail,
they do not speak, but help me hear
the thankful coolness of the air.

There are barely enough to make a difference,
yet we still keep pouring our emotions into
molten crucibles manufactured in a culture of hate.
Bronze or stonewall, our gilded images
prove nothing other than contempt for those
who have not squared themselves within our foursquare
temples.

I hope I can say, or will say someday, “I am addicted to
no one.” I hope you can tell, or will see someday, I have
put no one inside a cage. Do not distract me with your
false displays
of deity and spirituality.

No, I will stack my stones on the river, for,
I did not stumble this time; I had not fallen.
I was worn and I was weeping, I was sore, and
sleeping escaped my mind torn between
off-the-shelf-gods I thought I knew
and the silent one who was more elusive.

I may visit the river today, or next week.
I pray there are stones enough to pray my love in layers
to the God who speaks louder than
printed lines and stars torn asunder.
You, distant and so near to me, have
become to me the God of mercy,
the God of infinite wonder.

Waiting for the Miracle

Waiting for the Miracle

(“Children, guard yourselves against idols.” 1 John 5:21)

We hold our breath, we flip through the hymnal,
we sigh and gasp, we wait for the signal,
we want a sign, we last until midnight
then say goodnight
waiting for the miracle to come.

We erect our flags, prop up our candidates,
we salute the rags we had to fabricate,
red, white and blue; we sing this hymn to you
from wooden pews
waiting for the miracle to come.

We bar the rest, we rebuild torn curtains,
we earn our way, our belief is certain,
we lose our minds, we prize our opinions,
we’re good civilians
waiting for the miracle to come.

We paint the past, we gild it like heaven,
we think we’ll last, our land is god-given,
we walk on tombs, we are immigrants,
it’s just circumstance
waiting for the miracle to come.

And while we wait the poor are limping,
the aged never come down the stairs,
the sick have stopped asking,
their breath reserved for living.

And while we wait the Spirit is calling,
the Father has a banner of his own,
the Son takes down the flagstaff we’ve saluted
far too long

Waiting for the miracle to come.

Some have resorted to self-defense,
others to self-hatred, some to paying the rent;
some have reverted to soil and sawdust,
others imagine gold dust, some do what they must
waiting for the miracle to come.

Some hear in the quiet the cello note underneath it all,
some see graffiti and murals scribbled in a child’s scrawl,
some taste the wine, some touch the bread,
the divine aroma permeates all who know
the miracle has come.

Laced the Seedling

Laced the Seedling

(“Therefore see, the days are coming—oracle of the Lord—when I will punish her idols, and throughout the land the wounded will groan.” Jeremiah 51:52)

I.

Once upon the lush hills that faced the setting sun
a seedling bent toward the rays, a child of the forest began
its slow ascent toward heaven.

Barely wide as a finger, it poked through mud and loam;
a tiny firstling, a life unnoticed cast a late shade uphill until,
twice its present height, the shadow prophesied the future reach
of imperceptions rising.

Yawns broke through the evening, the fawns scratched against its skin,
cells begat cells, cambium begat xylem, and roots grabbed the earth deeper
than day. Richer than the bare-skinned plains and slower than the
willows along the river banks,
contentment defines the stretch into spring again and again. The
same buck elks sojourn in the same bright silk sauterne
left by the sun nearly every afternoon. The damp smells
of hopeful and fills the air with home.

II.

It goes without saying that everything is worth buying at
one time or another in its purest state or chemical imbalance.
It is worth noticing that the groves are sometimes replanted,
and old trees kiss the seedlings goodbye before the felling.
Lumber homes and wood-burning stoves, well-polished buffets
and antique displays of frontier tables and New England gables;
every grain is turned, captured, sweated and pressed into
human displays of utility and beauty.

Little league broken bats and perfectly bent bows, the arrows
honestly honed, and the bats truly turned so in the hands of
experts and novices their sweet spots find the mark.

And perhaps a few cells thick, after baths and interment,
the factories turn out the sheets for the next page-turner’s
printing. Inky symbols grooved upon the tree-skin
give directions, pain infections, start reflections,
end dissertations, begin palpitations and true/false,
the sweet deceit sways many once the ink has dried.

III.

Begun unaided, we bound the pages of what began
in the lazy forests unnoticed by man. “God has spoken,
chapter and verse; I’ve memorized each passage, rehearsed
and rehearsed.”
And yet, when thought is applied to the paint that has dried,
we might discover some have been reversed.

Oh, not God’s own Words (the truer than we know)
but our cut and paste, our personal parfait to please our
personal tastes.

There is One who sung the seed to life, who laced the seedling
like a violin string, and set it singing the forest’s song of
creation. Never rehearsing, the chorus rises from sky-warmed
patches of round and swirls between branches,
circles and dances in patterns invented by heavenly joy.

And those who beheld it suddenly knew the Laws
and Commandments are not letters and dictation. Somehow
the sweetest song ever heard resounded undisturbed;
flexible and true were never antonymous,
and Heavenly Words are best understood by those
who hear music in the desert, new tunes on the pavement,
cantatas in cathedrals and the best lyrics among the poor.

I just +

I just +

(“Don’t make treaties with the people there, or you will soon find yourselves worshiping their gods and taking part in their sacrificial meals.” Exodus 34:15)

We remain adolescents with hormones racing,
lust-struck by promises of magic-poof on the stage
of our abracadabras.

Let a $ wink at me and I pursue it hotly,
when the *s are brightest, my thinking becomes dull,
I ask no ? about the truth, see no sleight-of-hand suggestions,
I just +  to the gallery = to my searing imagination.

Worst of all I put my pinups on my altar-wall,
bibles and Buddha and Trump and Bikini-ed
await my worship. I’ve received the invitations
and sent the RSVPs, my signature guaranteeing
my devoted attendance.

Pimped out to the sham-hungry, I am glutted
banquet to banquet.
Shorthand allurance has detoured past my best senses
so I devour every fragrant idol; enticement shrouded
by religious dialect.

I make no decisions, just follow the mental secretions
that baffle faith seeking merely truth, not crushes.
We have made a teen idol of the Universe Designer
and
a personal prom-date of the Eternal Lover,
then choose to marry (how fickle and airy)
the one who makes our blood run hot

And leave behind the One whose Blood ran full
before we had a single desire to call our own.