Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
Birds fly across
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Category Archives: God
We Speak in Tongues
I have sometimes heard
The voice of God
remarkably salty
And full of fire
He is both
Placable and implacable in His anger
The first with sullen men
Then unsparing with his only Son
No siblings without the unendurable
No blind and lame set free
Without his blood for me
1 Corinthians 13:1 NIV
[1] If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
The Vigilant Ones
If I were to write a book of fiction for my children I would construct people for them, community, a family, let’s say, a big, sprawling, messy family
Maybe they would live next to some kind of river
Maybe the dogs would talk or the fish would taste like brightly colored jello confections.
Or maybe these fictional people, these purely hypothetical people, would just be back up
The silhouetted figures you might see on the crest of the hill above the sycamore tree as the sun sets
After the dam breaks
When they-you-we
Might need the vigilant ones
The most.
You are eternal
Years ago a man who fought fire told me that the hot center of it is black, vortex dark, a hole you could fall into and never stop
Falling
There is no fire without burning, I tell the children, each sun a metaphor for something
Something bigger than us
Something bigger than them
Than all the worlds of burning
Light reaching back to us
Saying something
Maybe in Morse code
Flashlit messages exchanged through neighboring windows by children in the night
You are…eternal
More than Cleromancy
2 Samuel 5:24 KJV
[24] And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the Lord go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines.
I will leave you to imagine a woman who slakes her insomnia with Sarah arranging flowers around her beloved Daisy, each a sign of constancy, piety, love
While God speaks
Says such specific things
Who knew each tree before it
Was anything but
An inkling in the palm of his hand
Luis, I…
Luis, I once lived in a country where the money I earned was worthless outside the country but could buy beautiful, irreplaceable things inside the country. I had a gigantic blue suitcase, a backpack. I took treasure home, but not enough. I should have emptied my bags of all the replaceable things and brought home treasure.
You are home treasure
You are Home, Treasure.
Coffee with Tara
I can’t have coffee with Tara, the stuff she drinks is way too strong for me now, but I wait for her anyway, keep glancing out smudgy windows at the passing clouds, shafts of light, signifying every
valley filled, hill made low, road made straight, and all these rough, rough ways, smoothed at last.
Luke 3:5
Tara B.
Revelation 21
Revelation 21:1 KJV
[1] And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
The whole world just a shotgun shack with the big fig tree in the backyard. We used to swing there on the old swing set, first for just us children, then the one even old people could sit in.
So clear in my mind
What passed away meant to you, meant to me, its euphemistic weight gone with all the passings, you, then grandpa, then dad
Passed away you would say then, whereas now there are no euphemisms, no ways of hiding
What the new looks like
All filled with glory.
Solomon
Ecclesiastes 4:1-2 KJV
[1] So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. [2] Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.
I generally chafe at the wisdom of Solomon. I want to measure my “wise guys” by their lives–faithfulness, sobriety, compassion. S-man seems to fall abysmally short on all categories.
When I read this verse from Ecclesiastes it resonates with my own sense of the fragility and tenuousness of life, but then I cannot help that Solomon had so many powers the ordinary dude did not have to:
Stop oppression
Comfort the bereaved
And use his power as a monarch to generally improve his culture
He had the power to live a different life, to show a different way. I am no king, but I will be judged by how much better or worse I use my power
To change things.
Contemplating Hell
He says that I have lost my chance with him, as though he is a lottery ticket torn from my grasp by a strong wind in a storm, fluttering away with its winning numbers and it promise of untold riches.
I have lost my chance with him.
A week ago I stood in the Salvation Army and showed my youngest daughter a tee shirt–got love? Become a foster parent.
Her face clouds. Her life was radically altered by my decision to foster parent.
You had your chance with me…
He was small and scratched his face into bloody tiger stripes, he did not speak at almost two years of age. He did not potty train until just before kindergarten. He once desecrated a couch in a strange feral way.
The stories of my chances with him could fill terrible books.
I get it kid, you have a new god now.
But I am haunted by what will happen to you if you don’t have the guts to contemplate
The hell you unleashed on all of us and all it’s damning consequences.
Carrying Light 