The hole in my chest has opened up again
Opened up
The whole in my chest is blown apart
Blown apart again
The tree abandoned by the river asks for something
Water or some proof
Some proof of all
made whole once
once again
Blown apart
Reply
Category Archives: child advocacy
I once knew a man
I once knew a man who was a dogged optimist, or so it seemed at the time. Sure, he spoke of darkness, but he spread a sunny optimism in every conversation he had.
Which meant that when the shadow of the Cross loomed large over us all
He had no answer
Isaiah 58
Commandments concerning bones
My darling, where would Ezekiel find such an army? Baked and broken in a hollowed out place. Surely, it cannot be real, you will say, even as you watch them mend themselves, vines and branches of humans rising from the dead.
We will meet them all again, the Holocausted, the left-for dead in bags on the floor, the murder victims of one sort of another will all one day hear their Deliverer’s commandment concerning bones
Out bones
Our children
Those who come after
Are set free
Hebrews 11:22 KJV
[22] By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones.
The Gerlach Method
From the beginning I have only been able to see them as tiny iterations of Calvin–the cartoon, not the moral philosopher.
They lie prone in upended rows in a hand-drawn version of
The antithesis of a maternity ward
Rows of neatly labeled, perfect and tiny, dinner roll backs, so prone, exposed
No skin gun can ever save us now
Dear Friend,
Within a month of each other, several things happened–
- A beloved family member who, like you, does not believe in God, said that if I believe in Hell, I should be trying to convince you of its reality and horror all the time.
- Several states, most notably Georgia, passed pro-child legislation restricting abortion and received fury for it from people who regard abortion as categorical maternal right.
- I read about a doctor who received NIH funds to carefully, (without anesthesia because it would adulterate their tissue “donations”) extract babies in their second and third trimester whole in order to use their prenatal livers to revive adult livers.
- And a single wasp stung me above the left eye.
I know how much you believe in abortion. I know how little you believe in God, yet I believe that the first abortion happened when a literal and real woman (like you and me) murdered all of us with a powerful and deadly choice in a garden we call Eden.
She made a choice, we make choices
As women, as mothers, as friends
To intervene for either life or death.
I believe in a literal hell, literal hells, already clearly delineated in our history of meat shields in steppe conquests, gladiatorial death matches, the ridiculous and deadly crusades, the Inquisition, bubonic plague, and in our case the body of every one of those meticulously harvested prenatal humans, old enough to live outside their mother’s wombs long enough for the doctor to use their pieces and ignore the sum of those parts.
Because livers are so necessary to scrub the toxins in the blood…even the flooding, momentarily excruciating wasp toxin.
You will think it strange that I thought of you and others who do not believe in Hell when I reeled into the pain of that single sting. I thought about how terrible it would be not to believe in the soaring truth of 1 Corinthians–“Oh, death, where is thy sting?”
No accident I write this to you on Father’s Day. When I lost my father it was so devastating–how could death have lost its sting if that single death hurt so much?
You know what I believe–I will see my father again one day, because Jesus took the real sting.
Catastrophically painful, eternal, and all of our faults. Sometimes no bigger than a wasp’s sting in the dark, or smaller than each prenatal human’s carefully extracted extinction.
But there in the Cross–
Our hell, our iterations of hell
Whether we believe in them or not.
Dear, you will and always and eternally be, dear, very dear to me.
So much so that I would risk your real and legitimate anger if it might spare you the measure of that incomprehensible Corinthian sting.
Oblígate carnivores
For months now I have walked carefully, gingerly, with the rocking gait of the elderly, infirmed, or, in my case, feet surreptitiously lamenting for the loss of the whole–
broken heart
crepe-fine skin
Liver, spleen, lungs, and stomach all exposed
As the obligate carnivores we tended as children stalk the house now
Grown
Larger than life,
Pacing hungrily to and fro
As we eye them in dismay
Their pets now
I want
I want rudimentary shelving in the wild backyard for the Walmart canoes
I want an art table
And an extra large button-down shirt with flecks of paint already on it
I want a shelter for the sun and shelter for the darkness
I want the trees to grow up around us, ramparts
And the tiny praying mantis to have a disproportionate number of siblings
Rain, so the river can rise above the exposed and naked roots of the
Already. Dying.
The Moveable Feast
Around 9:19 Sunday morning, a group of the gleaming victorious held their trophy improbably aloft as they processed along a predetermined route–grass, soil, concrete, rock. An entire congregation of them, as exoskeletal and bronzed as their trophy, the hind-leg of an unfortunate cockroach, meaty, mute contrast to those who intend to be meticulous
As they devour all
When you and I were unborn
An image has been taken, carefully constructed–a smiling woman with her small child, a pink placard, and a message of support for the categorical destruction of babies remarkably similar to her own.
When I was younger the rhetoric surrounding the clinical extermination of humans before the age of birth was careful, reluctant, almost sheepish or apologetic. Famous among these voices was Hillary Clinton who said that the aim of promoting legal abortion was to make it, “…rare”
When I was younger “the unborn” were called babies by those on both sides of the argument.
When I was unborn, abortion was illegal.
Not now.
Now there is a veritable cacophony of irate institutions and voices–democratic presidential hopefuls, movie streaming services, (ironically) the Disney company, a long list of celebrities, and that smiling lady with her baby on the grass
All bent upon promoting and facilitating medical murder.
And with each carefully posed picture, each premeditated exclamation of outrage they push down the simple facts–we have laws in this country which promote and facilitate the brutal, violent, dehumanizing murder of millions of people.
People who would one day watch Disney movies
People who might subscribe to Netflix
People who would argue unequivocally for their own right to life
If they were allowed to live long enough to
Sing
where have all the flowers gone?
Our children all
Gone.
Mending the Dragon
“These scales are remarkably hard to pierce,” I said to the wee brave patient as I tried and retried to reattach the wing, each stitch through layers of bright, obsidian scales
never made a sound
never whined or complained
This the cost of flight
and restoring what has been lost for so long
Carrying Light 