Category Archives: God

Eldest Child

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Something about Elvis impersonators, well-fed dogs, and raffles for them rattles around my head–keep asking myself what what can I give them? What can I do? When you were born I was still in college, George HW was president, both Princess Diana and Mother Theresa were still alive.

So many years of hunger.

I wish I could make it all better, like one of those chubby, diminutive fairy godmothers–change the immutable curse into a deep slumber, when you wake up

Wipe away all the tears from your eyes

Prepare a table just for you,

Things any decent mom would do…

Psalm 146:7 NIV

[7] He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free,

The Winter Swimmers

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They are out there somewhere still, three, sometimes four, figures and a dog who has long gone, gone past the snake on the path, gone past all the wounds of time, leaving snapshots of a good dog all the while the children howl full wind

They knew no shelter from the start

Miles of lonely nothing

No stones, bread crumbs, or birds to

Guide them back

Home.

Reflective Light

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Whether before or after the flock of cranes fly upstream at dusk, the moon catches its own face in the watercup waves

One three-quarter cameo dances into many

silvery-petalled-moons spun from the

Streaming coattails of a brooding sun

who has just

strode

up the river bank, across the burnished rooftops, past the crayoned, arbitrary horizon

Good-bye he said, over broad, burning shoulders,

leaving me all this lovely

reflective light.

He speaks to us in parables

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I leave the shower curtain on the living room floor and the little boy who does and does not resemble us takes it up, exclaiming, the periodic table! with the remains of his little boy voice.

Later, after forgetting and days of heavy gravity, I lift the curtain and pierce each hole again, arms growing heavy-diagonally, the way trees grow.

Admire the way they have been ordered each in their brightly colored boxes. Iron, gold, carbon, oxygen, and the exotic ones we seem to have conjured to fill up the empty places.

  • There whether we see or not.
  • Unchanged by our indifference.
  • Three or more dimensional even if we only see them flat.
  • Elements and symbols for when full words seem to be not enough

He speaks to us in parables.

Tara Lynn Badamo

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Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…

In the unassuming kitchen of God

Singing-

someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!

“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-

He talks beauty and parable

All tears wiped away.

Are you safe?

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Years ago a young man I knew asked me how he should treat his prom date. I told him to think about how he would want his sister to be treated. I meant protect.

This admonition came back to haunt me as I learned about many, many people who did not protect family members and strangers in situations of sexual vulnerability.

I asked myself what advice do you give?

Protect is a powerful word. It means if you are the older person, the person in authority, the soberer person, the bystander, it is your job to treat the child, the older person, the person who is not able to consent, or the person who is in your power as off limits sexually. It is your job to keep that person safe, no exceptions.

If you are the kind of person prone to sexual aggression, all this may seem toothless. But I don’t believe it is. I believe that you (whoever you are) really need to assume there is an interventionist God. One who makes no excuses for rape.

One Thing

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The lady in the picture is a fraction of her whole-a bit of glasses, hair like mine.  Did she shape the assignment or was it the Wizard of Oz for freshman comp?  I don’t know, but as with so many words shaped into injunctions it sticks in my craw–pick the one thing?  Not a good thing?  Not one among brothers? I suspect literary ambush, which then feels like literary paranoia, but I kick around/go into the weeds with this one thing-

You.  You are the one thing.  The voice in my head steadying my coward’s heart. My man, Jesus I tell Madeline about that universal division of time into before and after You.

Like if you believed in evolution it would be 50 billion, million zillion years BCE, and those sylphish, wispy 2000 after.

After you.

Let me just

Tag along after you

Big brother

Strong tower

Never-leave-me God

Calvarium 10

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I once read about a woman who believed she could dissipate 

…the clouds with her mind

but after much thought I have decided I do not want them to go

I see all their stories

As though God Himself were

Finger painting sand art

Casually insinuating angel wings here or the mirror reflection of the map of China in fluffy white

Clouds like babies come and go

Maybe they too grow up 

Go to college, stop needing us anymore as we gaze up at them snow-globed in blue sky beneath inky infinite wonder, fields of burning stars, 

Called all by name.

When words fail

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Poetry or prose.  

For the last three weeks I have had hives. Still have hives.  I have sifted words in and out of how this feels and each time all words have come up short.  They do not stop the itch. Like quack doctors, snake oil salesmen, or phone-a-gypsy psychics they play at reading my palms then leave me with no…

Balm

No remedy

No salve for my slowly metamorphic 

reptilian skin.

So I threaten them with silence or just undoing their fragile orthographic pieces unbending bes and esses into straight black lines

Because from geometry we know

Lines go on forever (in either direction)

Moving away from the itchy round helpless

Woman who once loved them

Out to the ends of time and light

To the place where God 

hears our wordless

Supplications.