To Be Played in B Temporary Minor

To Be Played in B Temporary Minor

(“Our temporary minor problems are producing an eternal stockpile of glory for us that is beyond all comparison.” 2 Corinthians 4:17)

It rained like the notes of a dusty upright piano played
in the parlor corner behind a dozen conversations.
The massive maple frame vibrated and rang,
and thunder background awoke the lazy gathering
like fire.

What is this dissonance, where the lost chords,
the freezing droplets at my back door? Who first
struck the white and black, the lightning aimed
like a late attack upon our senses?

What hands hewed the wood and studied each joint
to take the strain of 236 strings and 17 tons of tension?
What hand threw the flood and fire that started in the wall
and climbed while no one watched it smolder overnight,
after each guest from young to older left for home?

Whose frost wet the embers? Whose mind chewed through time
and swallowed the old piano whole which hands
on which mother and child suffered etudes and
dreamed the Beatles best tunes?

The home was empty when the fire attacked,
lives were saved, but memories and melancholy
still litter the battlefield where the uncompromise began.

Would you walk alone, now, with the sound alone, now;
would you settle for less once the music is silence and
the wedding photos are sloppy burnt? Will the

Stockpile of grace
consume all that was taken
and replace the hand-me-down piano
in a new parlor in the Father’s house?

Over the Load Limit

"Over the Load Limit"

Problems unspoken, and now we are over the load limit,
hauling cargo unfit for our carriers. We think it
brave to cross the ice-bound pass, skates and brakes,
hairpins and grades more frightening than a semester’s
trigonometry score.

We drag our backpack, overladen with hardbacks,
down linoleum halls lined with lockers never combined,
the numbers lost or stolen. From the second we step
to the moment we leap, we carry until our spines are
curved, carved by our overstuffed hampered.

We drag, we convey, we cargo, we convoy
but never lay our burdens down upon the side of the road.

We carry, one shoulder then the left; we heave, we assume,
we human, we chatroom, we loosen the straps at the advice
of an upperclassman with better precise. But we never
lay our backpack down in green pastures,
beside still waters

Until someone makes us.

And don’t we feel 40 pounds lighter,
don’t we laugh closely where the straps once chafed,
don’t we love crazier than the books we carried,
don’t we hug louder than the diesel’s attempts at
defined impossible.

There is no mountain we cannot climb
when we lay the burdens down aforetime.