Word Upon Word

Word Upon Word

(“I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.” Psalm 16:7)

I’ve been wondering what I should write because
sometimes it seems
I just pile word upon word like a jenga tumbler.
But I’m satisfied in what I’ve heard when lights
fade and the darkness brings the quietude I crave.
Stay and do not leave me here alone. We need no
sentences of nonsense to keep us awake. Sometimes we
can sit for hours and other times the seconds tick slowly
like the hum of locusts in the trees. The moments can
drone on in our faces like midnight apparitions.

I see the path behind me; hear the oceans I used to
visit and I long for years of yesterday when sunny days
inhabited my dreams. I listen for the familiar sound that
echoes like the laughter of friends. Along the way they
have seen my careless excursions and offered to accompany
me when the way was too steep to climb. This late in the
afternoon
they remind me that soon our rest will come, we will abide
asleep in the darkness that only shrouds us for the night.

I’ve listened as long as I could then I reset my alarm for
just one hour more. Words have accompanied me before
and they will carry me again. But theses streams of scenes
that show up in my dreams at night sometimes escort me
like a doula helping the morning give birth to unrehearsed
understandings. I’ll bend my ear to the blended affirmations
between the lines of night and day.

You Know the Grace

You Know the Grace

(“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ: Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.” 2 Corinthians 8:9)

Clothed in gold, washed in spring rain,
the grass is thick, the streams parade life
and young men’s dreams from foothills
to the pregnant river of long poetry;
creation’s own form of praise.

Surrounded by breeze, underneath these old
feet each day is cool with dew that never
dropped upon the soft green blades
of this playful morning before.

We wore our castoff clothing like
princes;
Our half-scales and jazz chords like
incense.
The music we hear, though
assembled before a not ever was played,
is beyond our talents; the gift is
in the singing;
what we never dreamed of before.

And yet, the key can sour with time,
the odes and dirges overtake our jubilant hymns.
And yet, the day can bristle with age,
the plush rose petals brittle and late.

Rich with melody, yet faded with age
we may forget the sun on our faces,
the soft earth’s carpet on our back,
and the words that sent us leaping may
fashion weeping instead.

What, day of joy and night so old,
how may I find, discover, define,
and hold forever
the single afternoon memory of a
meadow spring—unvisited for decades.

How old is Your gift; the music, the rain,
the warm, the same thoughts that
once coaxed love from uncertainty?
But ageless is not old; but ever.
And the song; redemption’s dialogue of
God and man

Will remain the tune I whistle
half-forgetting its title.

All Your Commands

All Your Commands

“May my tongue sing of your promise, for all your commandments are righteous.” Psalm 119:172

We do not often think of “commandments” as a reason for singing. I cannot recall any Top 20 songs recounting the joys of speed limits or lyrics happily recalling a summer of shoplifting restraint. Perhaps that is the reason that even as followers of Jesus we do not always see the commands of God as reason to rejoice.

Us Pause

Us Pause

(“I’ll tell my good friends, my brothers and sisters, all I know about you; I’ll join them in worship and praise to you.” Hebrews 2:12 [The Message])

As the word went round the circle, mouth to mouth
the quotes and opinions spun; each word hastily proclaimed
like a king or prince or monarch on the run. We were quite
glad for the stories and judgments laid down, for they reminded us
how different, how silver, how shiny we have become. No one
has opinions any more, no estimates or guesses; just a rockslide
of well-worn facts without footnotes; leaving no argument
available for the person cradling coffee alone, silent
at the next table.

We know too much, we echo the findings of our favorite
hole-puncher,
and stutter grain-sized worship that falls upon the carpet
to be vacuumed with the mud and dust later in the afternoon.

Oh Christ, our Love, our Pioneer into our uncharted souls,
Your silence is more eloquent than our flappery, aglow with
patience while we predict the next planetary virus will wipe
out the worst of them-not-us.

Oh Son of Man, our Song, our Conductor into concerted whole,
Your song over them, over us, over all, breaks our hearts,
numbs our tongues until we’ve learned the chorus so well
we no longer tell unrestrained stories to back our cause;

You, our only option, have given us pause…

To begin the ballad sweeter and deeper from front
to end.

Dust and Thirst

Dust and Thirst

(“Come down from your lofty place and sit in the dust.” Jeremiah 48:18a)

You sit in your dust and you laugh as if you drink all day from
a tap of crystal liquid; so cool your burning eyes assume all will be
healed under the flow of its spring.

You bivouacked a place higher than your enemies,
you set up camp to display your long stature, your tall statues,
your walls which shine with whitewash sheen. In the desert you
can pretend all summer and nearly all autumn as well; the veneer is

smeared upon the stacked rubble walls. You stole the shimmer from
mica and polished bronze in angles to reflect the sun's long rays
for the fat portion of the day into the last few sightseers' approving view.

But the rains reveal you are austere; enough water to persuade your
pretty pebble to let loose of their sham of a veneer. You are done.

I stand in humanity's circle, showing off my latest braintrust just the same
as ancient Moab and Dibon, its royal city. Here's the thing, we who sing
our praises through the summer until the rains of revelation expose our
bling as nothing more than drugs store trinkets, we will thirst in the dust
if we do it long enough.

Come down from your heights, you boaster of National rights;

Start the hike today, off the mountain; do not delay, your boast is only
brighter balloons filled with the same gas as the names you've claimed
are behind every conspiracy. You are the tyranny you decry.
Your hunger to be right is the heresy that prevents tomorrow's meal
from gracing a family so hungry their faces are smeared messy after
the feast.

Tenants of Planet Earth

“You, Lord, are my God! I will praise you for doing the wonderful things you had planned and promised since ancient times.” Isaiah 25:1

Patti and I rented a number of apartments and houses before we bought our first place to live. What a difference it makes to actually own the floors you walk on. Even though we were no responsible for all the upkeep, there was less worry about how the landlord would see things.

The Oeuvre

The Oeuvre

(“Your righteousness, God, reaches to the heavens, you who have done great things. Who is like you, God?” Psalm 71:19)

What lies behind the sky, and behind that, what shines
to light the fires of prying men and women, short on bread,
but long on invention?

What hums below atomic structure, and inside that, what twirls
like wind within each bit of matter that momentary men and women,
short on time, wish to rewind to see it all again?

The days are gray only until the clouds pass away
and reveal
the open pastels of the polished sky.

Overhead, underfoot, we can shake, we can look
and never see or always sense the genius intentions
of a world beyond imagination…If only it would behave
one long minute.

You, Oh Lord, are not deus ex machine, arriving with fanfare
before the paint has dried and we are cornered. I would happily
drop a coin and another to quench my thirst with a soda
and buy an invisibility cloak the next time I am about to blush
from shame or guilt or memories of the same.

You, Oh Lord, surround our idiot currencies, double-siding
our front-side only presentations. You pass through the
spaces between atoms and pass over our aspirations that
never quite get off the ground.

You, Oh Lord, are our delight. You are the not the final act,
but the entire body of work, the oeuvre, corpus Christi annotated
on every unaltered space of time. We will recite, not rote
memorization, but the ineffable lyric unbound by our
nearly rhymed effort to join words to worthy expressions
of joy.

You Did Well

“The master answered, ‘You did well. You are a good and loyal servant. Because you were loyal with small things, I will let you care for much greater things. Come and share my joy with me.’” Matthew 25:23

It is good to set our sights high, to have lofty dreams and hope to achieve great things in our lives. In fact, Scripture often encourages us with phrases like “Set your mind on things above” and refers to believers as priests and kings. The difficulty lies in the leap we make from the effort needed to accomplish those dreams and the big payoff we are hoping for.

Compression

"Compression"

(“Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.” Hebrews 13:15)

His life once expanded, people traveled to ask his advice,
to watch his mannerisms and copy his reflexes. He was only
half of what they saw,
though the hidden half frightened him from daylight into
nightmares.

They etched his name on plaques and bylines,
brought babies with coughs for him to cradle,
sat him down around hardwood tables with
state committees. The governor’s wife presented
the award paired with a guitar-man statue on his
haphazard office wall. Musicians applauded,
and the sharp arc of his trajectory was combined with
just the right velocity to land him
happy once the hard work was done.

But his sad half never smiled,
dark side cold, stubbornly deflecting
the weak force attempt to turn it toward the sun.

Blind side hardly smiled,
cold side stark, visionless and pallid
though colors swirled around it,
the hidden half never upgraded,
afraid it would be discovered in its
perpetual monochrome.

His life once expanded, now the diameter of a dime;
pain limits his excursions,
fear authors the versions of every story he remembers.
He is few.

But he cries. He turns the music loud. He keeps the
doctor long to have someone to talk to. He loves
and does not know how to. He faces himself and
wonders how this all will end, with tears and pain
his dinner and desert.

But he cries. He turns to You. He keeps on
asking so he will not have to regret. Tomorrow
still frightens him, with so little room to maneuver.

But he cries…to You. And he knows You,
though all is puzzle and spiral, and thanks You
for hope that seems wickedly illogical. Hold him
now, he lays his lonely assumptions in the strongest
Hands he knows.

Music and Joy

“Praise the Lord, because he is good. Praise his name, because it brings such joy!” Psalm 135:3

I think music is one of the great equalizers in the human experience. Certainly we all have our favorite styles, but the underlying appreciation for music transcends age, experience and culture. It is one of the primary ways of expressing our individual and cultural identities.

Metronome of Grace

Metronome of Grace

(“Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.” Psalm 95:1)

We had wrung every dream we could from the clouds,
we had sung every voice we knew from the sea,
we had searched every star we could and rejoiced,
we had splurged every dime we had near and far

To find the music gushed out of rocks like
the fountains within our hearts.

We were quiet mostly; we listened closely.
We shouted impromptu; we stumbled onto
unwary melodies fit for melancholies and
and stories that twined the sad and joy combined

To heaven’s river that flows without time;
a sweet whirlpool, dance and dirge; outside life
and within each pod of creation.

We sang when darkness fled, and re-sang when
daylight departed; midnight kept time to
the metronome of grace notes divine;
we whispered, we shouted the theme fit
for our King.

Dancing Kids

“My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast. I will sing and make melody.” Psalm 57:7

One of my favorite poets William Stafford wrote, “Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.” Jesus told us that we must become as little children to inherit God’s kingdom. This verse speaks of an inner confidence or stability that enables us to worship because the world is filled with God’s handiwork.

Hope and Chains

Hope and Chains

(“For this reason I’ve asked to see you and speak to you. In fact, it is for the hope of Israel that I’m wearing this chain.” Acts 28:20)

The list of events, the chain of sentences, an opening,
a booking, the words of innocence spoken were written
in graffiti light across the darkened alleys.

The scarves in the wind, the breeze on the river,
a stanza, the snippets of authenticity hovered like
angelic confetti just above sea level.

The poems we read, the lyrics in our heads, a Friday late,
a classroom, the paragraphs of novices settled like
incense, prayer, and flickering candlelight.

Shackled wrists paint of freedom,

imprisoned pain composes joy,
hushed tongues announce the praise,
and broken legs dance the spring of
fawns and does in the woodlands new.

The Christ we know, the Word uncreated, an opening,
a looking, the Truth and Innocence spoken and earthen;
dust and heaven in quiet hope come morning,
come evening,
come maskless without dreaming;

The Christ we know, the Word our love
like crystal rivers comes streaming.

Re(Count)

Re(Count)

(“I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.” Psalm 9:1)

That’s right; you put the secret in both the ears
of a child. You discounted the worth of one more person,
the words heard by children who think mysteries should be
parties and balloons and funnery,
never dark sentences to disguise the peeling paint from our own
limited color selections.

But, whatever you may have done,
whatever I may have heard,
whatever you may have said,
whatever name I have slurred,
whatever we both have pled,

The cat’s out of the bag, squirming in a young child’s brain.

That’s right; we’ve all let the nasty nouns fall on other parades,
filled fortune cookies with empty ticker tape,
put children on the front lines to tell our tales
(who doubts the innocence, therefore the judgment)
of a child.

Yet, for our wars and (mud, of thee I sing), Fine-ally,
our God of knowledge full, can spell the words we’ve left
partly voweled upon gravel flowers. Yet, for our spin and
(sin, fair and snake dance) our God of timeless location,
can stop the disc mid-song, expose the onion layers we
hoped protected our (I swear its true) stories. Hugs and
sorry-s don’t retrieve the airwaves danced yesterday on
ears unmentioned.

But pieces in a box, players around a table, we
(all, like both Cain and Abel) have little to offer to
the One who Wholly is what we (holy are not).
My wins and losses and reporting thereof, never match
(Oh Praise and peace) the Truth that always speaks
(and does)
wonderful words of love.

Stuck in My Head

“Each of the four living creatures had six wings, and their bodies were covered with eyes. Day and night they never stopped singing, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord, the all-powerful God, who was and is and is coming!’” Revelation 4:8

Are you a person of habit or routine? I know I am. You could set your watch by my regular trip to the Post Office when I pastored my first church. I would drive the half mile into town, go to the PO Box, smile and greet the others retrieving their mail and head back to the office. On the way I stopped at a convenience store to pick up my second cup of coffee for the morning. Tuesday through Friday that was my routine.

Last Time I Spoke

Last Time I Spoke

(“The LORD lives! Praise be to my Rock! Exalted be God, the Rock, my Savior!” 2 Samuel 22:47)

Like I was saying the last time I spoke, I’ve changed a lot in 40 years,
do you remember when, and then again, I’m not sure my memories are true.
I sometimes wonder if my recollections are just an image salad
dressed up to suit my mood.

I swear I still care whether people read my poetry. But when I empty myself
on the paper, hurt by words of narcissists, as a rule, I do not mean you,
and would prefer you do not think so. Irony is, please, that the pleasantries
I’ve written for those who heal me well, seldom read my words at all.

So, do you remember me? Can you recall? My hair is shorter and
my head aches pillow to pillow. I’m weary, silent too often, and wish
one or two
would apologize for their misreadings.

Nonetheless, I yet am blessed, I will say it above the sad cloud globing my heart,
for having known you, a few, and many years later, gladder still.

Would you recognize my voice, my name, my theater, my limp, my lame;
would you see what I paint, my morning, my grief, my hope, my belief;
would you credit my faith that weeps more than laughs, that wishes,
grinding teeth privately, joy dance more often, and less before
catastrophe.

I should have ended that strophe with a ? but chose to leave the
.
intact?

Living, though You do not breathe my air,
will You take my tears, reinforce them with phone messages
from the few I do not fear? My search continues, river views or
backward glances, for the happy few I knew unenhanced by
this poly-marathon.

Rock unmoved, I moved too often, at Your bidding I believed,
except the times when rhymes failed mortally, and the dessert
swallowed me mid-family.

Savior, was I born again the way they say? Nearly 40 years ago
You knocked aloud and, apart from the crowd, I nodded assent,
and now below the clouds I need the happy hours I first knew,
a friend, a band, songs and branches, to accompany me
until headaches and heartaches cease this unwelcome dis-ease.

Heaven's Note

“Shout praises to the Lord! Shout the Lord’s praises in the highest heavens.” Psalm 148:1

A sheep rancher in the remote mountains of Idaho discovered his violin was out of tune. He tried to make it sound the way it should, but without a tuning pitch, he was unable to get it right. A frequent listener to a radio station in California, he wrote the station concerning his problem.

Bless the Lord...always

“Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion! Bless the Lord, O my soul!” Psalm 103:22

An attitude of praise implies two things. First, and most obvious, that God, as God, is greater than we are and deserves our devotion. The second is not as apparent, but I believe just as powerful. Praise unites all living human beings on one level of kinship. We are all part of God’s dominion, none neither greater nor lower.

Upon Their Brightest Days

Upon Their Brightest Days

(“All Jerusalem should praise you, our Lord, when people from every nation meet to worship you.” Psalm 102:21)

I should be strong, less old, less likely to ache my way downstairs;
but it seems, I know not why, You, O Lord have made me old much
before my time.

My father slouched like an octogenarian before he reached 60,
and shuffled so much that sparks of static electricity constantly
tingled from his fingernails.

You, Lord, live forever, never a doubt in my mind. You are ageless,
from predawn to afterglow, over and under the bridges and tunnels
we use to connect yesterdays to today. You invented time before
time existed at all. You will never die, never having been born,
and will wrap time in a ribbon, intersecting every moment in
a beautiful bow at the end of days.

Please don’t cut my life in half, do not make me walk with a cane
or hold my head in agony over pain that will not escape. I do not
know
how to talk to you, though I
know
you will allow my cries, my fist in the air, the resounding of it
from skyhigh to pounding on my table. I do not know how to
make demands
on the Judge of All, the Writer of every Ordinance from sky
to canyon, desert to delta. Alpha to Omega, You include all
that there is, and my pain, my limp, my lately ailments must
be a portion of all You include.

You, Lord laid the foundation of the earth,
painted the vaulted ceiling of the sky.
In the beginning You started it all; Love laying brick like
a king building a castle for his princess.

But I still remain the same, with these ailments that nail me to my bed
until midafternoon,
the pangs that shoot through my head like a sniper laying the crosshairs
across my temples.
I only feel the hot lead and never hear the bang.

You, Lord, investigate this tragedy,
report back to me, if it is likely to
yield an answer that gives me back the half
that has been stolen from me.

Yet I know You can never change,
Yes I know you are always the same,
Each friend, each relative, every voice that cries
for You
whether pain or praise
finds You closer (at the end of the length You have measure)

Than they thought upon their brightest days.

Boasting in the Lord

“Boasting in the Lord”

 (“Christ Jesus…became for us divine wisdom and righteousness and holiness and redemption, so that as has been written, ‘Let the boaster boast in the Lord.’” 1 Corinthians 1:30b, 31)

Have you ever noticed someone who simply can never be wrong? Suppose a friend misplaces a book they were reading at your house. He calls you up and says, “I know my book is over there. I’ve looked all over my house and in my car. I even opened up my dog’s mouth. It’s not here, so you must have it.”