LATEST POSTS
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The rain comes when it will
Waiting for the rain takes patience
in this time of life.
When I was a child it rained often
sometimes in such torrents
that we ran into the garage
and climbed on garbage cans
to watch it like the last three minutes
of the NBA finals — long,
punctuated, shouts, pauses.
We crashed the lids in imitation
and celebration.
But now it seems to drip and fuss,
as if the flowers and trees,
had just better get used to its moods,
to the ever-repeated windups
of the pitcher on the mound.
And so I wait,
hoping it does not notice my waiting,
does not as a result become sullen,
does not lurk back into its room
to storm on its own.
I honor its youthful independence
while I cajole it out,
persuade it to play fair,
beg it to freshen the air,
and to drum up all that joy one more time. -
What the snow shows
When it snows
you notice the trees that have fallen
all year round.
Leaning on others,
they come into view, heavily arched,
tipped or broken
with just a slide
of white drawn along their edge separating them
from the rest.
It is as though
the woods have become a cemetery
voices tender
in regret
at not having noticed each loss
sooner. -
Morning prayer
Blessed be my fear, even the void,
the pinch that grips my waist
when I pick up this pen.
Blessed be this exertion,
the slow scratching of the pen on paper,
following blue lines in uncertain waves of listening.
Blessed be my breath,
the way it sounds inside,
may my ears may be trained to hear to it.
Blessed be the gentle birds flitting around my head,
landing, pecking, building nests, covering their eggs --
may we speak true words to one another.
Blessed be the light-footed spiders who live there, too,
their willingness to let me pull the threads out of their webs,
not to break them, but to see them more perfectly.
Blessed be the patient unwinding of each thread,
of respinning it into another web,
or spooling it to be stored for a later time.
Blessed be the sacred sundering of the webs,
when they are swept away whole cloth
until plain and honest are revealed at last.
Blessed be.
Blessed be honesty.
Blessed be listening.
Blessed be effort.
Blessed be the mysteries,
the birds building nests, the spiders spinning webs,
the scratching along light blue lines.Something to set the stage for NaPoWriMo. I need to come back to this about day 18. 🙂
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40,000 feet at night
Fields quilt the landscape
and fade into black canvas.
Lights needle forth
up through airy space, up
from bridges, harbors,
winding strips of highway
to form constellations
of seeming clarity. How simple it is
to recess the whole world,
submerge it like a filthy pan
in dishwater, to be surprised
by a kind of beauty
in distance – pins of light,
clouds of suds – as if
I could choose between
this way and the other. -
On feeling unsure
This morning looking out the window
for our trash cans,
because my mind runs away
to all the small things
on days like these,
my eyes settled on a blue jay --
or perhaps his eyes drew mine --
as he took flight into the birch
to meet his mate.
His boldness
made me aware again of doubt,
and of all things reshaped by boldness,
hope, and the unnamable sigh
uttered when witnessing
a blue jay flutter up a birch
to meet another.Published in Anawim Arts Journal, Fall 2022. Please visit Anawim Arts and browse through the wonderful visual and written art offered.
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My soul work is this
That I no longer hope to be a saint
That I no longer think you want me to be
That I accept we are polar opposites
and that you have your place
and I have mineThat I will always try to be a saint
and fail
That you will always scratch your head at me
and grinThat I am made at least in part
of a certain kind of rusted, sharp-edged metal,
even perhaps tin,
and that you are sky,
and tin cannot ever become skyThat out of all your great skyness
you have given me a small earful of yourself,
just enough for me to talk with youAnd that that small part – or even all of sky itself –
cannot change tin into skyBut that it may
with dogged pursuit
of admittedly unobtainable saintliness
wear down the jabbing edges
of my harsher partsand in time allow me to uncover
my finest human light
Reflections on the first part of The Dark Night of the Soul.
Poems from in between 