Memory the Book

Memory the Book

(“Meanwhile the earth fills up with awareness of God’s glory as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14 [The Message])

To walk alone, the woods, the foothills,
and see the nodding leaves left on the barefoot floor
is less inspired than to be tethered to another soul
who sees the beams between the trees while you
feel the cold shade of winter’s shadow underneath them.

Though full of lessons around every bend, solitary
bests my attempts to take it all in.

So I wrote a good initial stanza, the words are lazily out of reach
for the rest. I think I gave my heart to more than one friend who
took it with them and moved out of town.

Pieces scattered, old cinder block ash, across the map,
an x and y axis of time and place. I spend too many days alone
to write well anymore.

I make up forests from my memory, old trees waking
I once tried to photograph trunk to canopy before my father told me
it would never work, taking pictures that way. I never tried again.

I’ve made too many mistakes to trust myself
to write from my heart anymore. Laughter forsook me
with the last piece of trust placed in the hands of a man
who cried with me at lunch. His wife of youth gone
too soon cancer. Owing to my weaknesses shared
(too soon as well) the friend couldn’t help but
clumsy my soul. It wasn’t his fault, we mostly
trample like fall our opportunities.

To walk alone in the woods, the foothills
unshared with another, soul to soul, is an
ingrown blindness; though swimming in
a Sea of Glory, we depart and dry.
Divide the ramble, eyes doubled four,
is a holy panorama; sloshing in the
Sea of Glory, more wet and head to toe,

Whether smile or cry, the day is meaning
and memory the book to read happiness by.

A Chatty Meander

A Chatty Meander

(“Look to the mountains—the feet of one bringing good news and proclaiming peace!” Nahum 1:15a)

Why we pick up kaleidoscopes to distill our images
and write them down to tell the truth in words that agree,
sentence and syntax,
is a bother of childish nations. Bits of glass cut from
broken art
fall, sounding like sand poured onto hardwood floors,
and refract away the terms of armistice. We would
rather play with bent sunlight than face reports that
reflect poorly upon our character.

I was never a ruffian, not quite a scientist either;
gangs would not have me…short and lightweight,
labs always puzzled me…mix these and those and
hope for explosion.

I had hoped to be a mystic, fighting angels who saw me clear,
or mocking demons for my career. But my fingers never tingled
just so, and dreamwork was shoddy leftover fears and lunch.

I had hoped to be a digger, finding potsherds in the strata,
or explaining remains and copying data into contexts of finds
not yet considered. But I only dug with tablespoons and
found worms to hook a crawdad or two.

I hoped to be a singer, a writer, a voice commanded attention
even when I whispered. But I only wrote in secret, afraid to
step outside the well-scored boundaries set by rules I
had not written…no, not the rules, but my fear of them.

And what I heard at each junction was I did not sing three notes well,
could not afford the room, the board, the academic unrewarded premiums.
My words were too skeletal, my repentant handwriting still illegible,
despite every attempt to clean up the erasures I should have burned instead.

At the end of the road now, too late to restart, cornered by time and excuses,
there has to be someone behind me to do what I should have done.
Speak to the ones who treat the unalike like simpletons. Declare peace is
better than shallow pandemonium (where demons rule the world we thought
we finally had understood.)

Go to the name-callers who use their high-chairs as babel towers
pretending a better view. Brave you instead of weeping me. Face you
unlike hidden me. Love you lest breaking me. Go second now that
I’m too far and far too foolish to think

My

Words

Have

Meaning this late in the day.

Only let the piecework, the quiltwork shout what I
meant to shout from the beginning.
Only let the workshop, the worksheet manufacture
the focus I knew I knew from the calling.
Only let the mountains where the giant telescopes
point to the sky
proclaim to the blind (I, and we, big and bits, whole and
holy, destined and undefined)
peace, Peace, PEACE

In the valley (unless you’d like to pay another dime
for the kaleidoscope’s rhyme-plastered lie.)

Peace, Peace, PEACE

In the valley (for you and me I pray).

O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem

(“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, are only a small village among all the people of Judah. Yet a ruler of Israel will come from you, one whose origins are from the distant past.” Micah 5:2 NLT)

Each year we are reminded that something extraordinary took place in a small Jewish village over 2000 years ago. Though it is fairly evident that Jesus was likely born in the spring, our winter date for the celebration has taken hold over time, and here we are; twinkly lights, the crunch of snow, bundled up carolers and all.

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.

Opening Night

Opening Night

(“And the men, in great awe of the Lord, offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” Jonah 1:16)

Unsuspecting of anything sacred among us, we set our course
as if we have rehearsed each unmet morning promised by evening. Only
upon when tossed like eggs for an omelet upon surges higher than our
expectations
do we look in the holds and find our hopes have been sleeping wingless
upon our customary passage.

We play the causes like actors trading ad-libs, making up line upon line
from goodwill to malevolent behind the transom, behind the curtain,
and wait for the applause to validate our one-line wit with which
to wrap up the world.

They keep telling us the music is in the rests, and the magic is
in the pauses, the drama in the unspoken moments when breath
sits like haze upon the frog-pond; but we are quick to the trigger,
uneasy with a world enriched by our erased dialogues.

By now opening night should have passed, the clapping, the laughter,
the happy timing we were after, finished and set before the chosen few
like a child’s drawing on the fridge. But too few knew what it took
to finish (starting so brilliantly) a study in hard work and cake frosting.

Rest and depressed, sometimes we are left with only the pages
of the script
left in our hands. No one to read all the lines, 6 actors reading 9.

Stepping foot now, I hope the silence means sacred, and even the
exhaust fumes from the highway behind me, remind me, holy. The
script reads the same today.

On Replacing the Images and Shadows

On Replacing the Images and Shadows
(“Are your ears awake? Listen. Listen to the Wind Words, the Spirit blowing through the churches. Christ-conquerors are safe from Devil-death.” Revelation 2:11 [The Message])

The metaphor looms behind me, rising over my future,
casting its shadow into years one or two, multiplied ahead.
The analogy was not pretty that pretended my language,
nor the simile like anything that would dress up an unshaven day.

Days went without new words to replace the ancillary version,
secondary visions pretended the whole. (Weaklings cry and
you cannot trust anyone) and I refused to cry around anyone
who could not cover my losses.

The shadows follow, they are what mothers muttered and fathers
replayed
until we knew nothing of the mountain breeze, and drank only
of mirages.

But You, Metaphor and Meaning, replace my images, the
gray men and women who populate my ethic,
and literally, one soldier at a time, they are dying,
replaced, line by line, by the paradigm of a Word
fleshed out, hungry like me, and bruising just as easily.

I cannot ignore the poetry, the verses unrehearsed perfection;
the humanity, the divine unrefined connection
between a hill in time to my present unrhymed attempts
at following something better

Than a previous shade; death remade (ha! Unmasked
pretender) breath unfrayed (HoSanna
uplifted) life arrayed (He’s undone
our afraid)

Seek Good

“Seek good and not evil, that you may live; so shall the Lord, the God of hosts, be with you, as you say.” Amos 5:14

It seems like the simplest thing. To stop and consider the question, “What would make a better world?” Wouldn’t we all answer with something like, “People doing the right thing in every circumstance, as much as is possible.” I know that people may disagree over what may be the “right” thing in some circumstances, but those differences don’t seem to be the chief source of our world’s ills.