I think just to mess with me, the weather app will place one small storm cloud on the far horizon of days. I tell myself, the light is moving away, the days grow short, the heat will break, these are just shoes in a messy front hallway, seemingly lost and matchless, discardable, but
Make no sudden moves
Until the rains come
I once knew a man who said it should be the parable of the prodigal father, which, of course, is true. We are not very prodigal with much but our father’s treasure.
I have been the younger son. I have been the older son. Jesus knows that we are all really not great sons–judge-y or profligate or both, so he gives a story where the two great characters are an old man and a fatted calf.
The man who saves the world makes himself the main course at a feast thrown for a loser.
I am that loser. The shining moment of clarity in any human life is when we realize we are all the prodigal child.
And so we should know the rules for prodigals–
I have done nothing to deserve this inheritance I have squandered
I have made little account for the days my Father has grieved on my behalf
But he never stops hoping I will come home.
What pride, what fear, what foolishness can withstand the power of love?
Luke 15:17-20 KJV
[17] And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! [18] I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, [19] And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. [20] And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
The girl-child mama ties her daughters to her–kites, they rise
Aloft in the summer breeze
Curl, swirl, dip, and sing
Bird-children
While faraway grandmother
Ponders apogee
The furthest point one can be from another.
I remember you
I remember when you ran into the waiting room with your sister
I remember all the warnings and admonitions I got from Martha-the-caseworker and your recently relieved first foster mom
And your blue-as-the-sea implacable gaze across a very misguided table
I remember your speech therapist and her fairy godmother-like delight in seeing you make eye contact and in watching your self-inflicted facial wounds
Heal and not return
Storms all over the place
Storms in you swirled all around us, even when I tried to contain them.
I wonder, did he stick to the margins of the day? Hold palms aloft for shade? Trudge through the seasons? Chafe at this appointed endeavor?
Think, “surely this will vouchsafe my peaceful demise?”
I do not know anything except
The hours he had
Squinting into morning sky, evening sky
Lovely clouds, all sea foam and flocks
Anchored by love
Isaiah 40
Luke 12:32-34 KJV
[32] Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. [33] Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. [34] For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
What would you tell a dying world? A lost child? Or the person who
Won-hands-down-the Complete Ass of the Decade Award?
You are my treasure
Because where my treasure is, my heart is also.
For weeks now I have watched the tree thirst to death, unable to tell it that there is very little hope. Its auburn hair has cascaded around us, weeping, and I have felt both inadequate and way too nonchalant.
So I crafted a fictional me who did all the desperate things the real one should–buy yards and yards of burlap, soak the naked roots with water scooped from the river, gather the seedlings, cut careful branches and apply growth hormone to them, explain all this to the dying tree
The real tree gestures up to the mother tree, deeper into the soil, the manicured lawn, sources of man-made hydration.
And then down to the clay and rocks, blanketed now in the reddish needles, strange nourishment
sufficient to grow
Saplings
once she has gone
She flaps her (flightless) wings and flutters about
Because surely birds can’t cry and this world is full of sorrow
She is almost human, fully sentient with the wary eyes of someone who knows what it is to not have opposable thumbs
So I tell her, do your graceless angry dance and I will translate for you
About how eternal we are in this brutal place
Where the stars tell us things in the darkness
About hope
Dammed hope
Which will one day soon
Break free
The bald cypress
Is just a tree
A single tree on a riverbank where
Autumnal colors signify slow, thirsty death from the bridge to the broken
Dam
They try to tell us they are dying with a bride’s train of leaves blown out on the current
Stronger now that the dam has broken
The world has always been this way they will tell you
As if that would be enough
For you, for me
Carrying Light 