Mangling the vulgate so close to the end of our story, dive, I tell him. Dive into the deep
Blue water, temporary darkness
The way a man may rise
From his own grave, from his shroud
If the voice of the Divine
Calls him back
Lazarus/Dives
Reply
Category Archives: grief
Uriah
He has found a little stream, dips his feet into the water away from all the others. When I ask him about all he has lost, he shrugs as if to say
Lost wife
Lost country
Lost king
Lost friends
But he has new friends now, even among the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren of his erstwhile wife.
He recites these my-life-for-yours words as if the man who wrote them had written them for him…
….He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. [18] The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty. [19] A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. [20] A man’s belly shall be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth; and with the increase of his lips shall he be filled. [21] Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. [22] Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing , and obtaineth favour of the Lord . [23] The poor useth intreaties; but the rich answereth roughly. 24] A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly:
…there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
Let us wait here, darling
Until he comes.
Was it a crime?
Was it a crime for the man in the silver truck to exit his vehicle to drag the wounded doe to the median?
Then leave her there.
Was it a crime to drive past her
her immobility
As she lifted her head
in pain and wonder
At all of us, terrible Samaritans
Leaving her to die alone.
His Holocaust Clothes
Strange how we can take words and reduce them to
shadows of their former selves
Willfully diminishing
What casts a shadow
and the utter strength of light
Close
Days before the Passover lamb, John the Baptist mends her long robe, pours oil over wounds with words which make sense only to the dead, faith the fire we warm our hands by,
Let me in, let me in says the moon and the wind, let me in to the stillness of everlasting, as even now the children begin to
Lay down their outer garments, their palm branches, as we all sing, hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
We are close now, so close .
Eulogizing Joe
Methuselah lived 969 years, which means that at just over 100, my grandfather was a spring chicken, as lifespans go. That notwithstanding he got a lot done. Married, participated in at least three wars, fathered children, buried some. Lost a wife, found another, called me his oldest unmarried granddaughter for as long as it applied.
I loved him in all his iterations, in all his familiar imperfections, but I know Someone who loves him more.
The One who is the Road
The All and Only
Road Home.
Psalm 116
Locker Room Obscenities
Inside the camera frame men laugh about bartering girls as sex slaves.
Where are these men now?
Where are their victims?
Is there a Mendelian trait for “monster?”
It is easy to focus on the unfamiliarity of words
They use
For the blue or green eyes
of their victim
But locker rooms are locker rooms
everywhere because
the god of lust and violence has so many
F*cking clothes in his f*cking closet
My anger dog, my anger cat
This morning I contemplated creating (Galatea-style), a metaphorical anger mascot.
Something with breathable fake fur and big flappy hands.
But I realized I have real pets who fit the bill–
An anger dog, an anger cat.
She rolls on her belly so I can pet her, but barks mercilessly at her compatriot
He snuggles close, however briefly, attempts his most disingenuous
Resting cat face
But I know I cannot
Let them
Run free.
Unsparing Prose
Unsparing means “receives no mercy.”
But I prefer just unsparing prose which would be the writing equivalent of the clean kitchen I wish I had. No moldy bread, no stale potato chips, everything organized and wiped clean,
Bare.
If my prose is bare enough, then I can strip from it the insomnia and the anger and leave only the facts.
The truth without adjectives.
Simple, awful, but so far, still sparing,
Because we have so far, survived.
Writing about terrible things
I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.
I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.
You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.
We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.
All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.
You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.
Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.
Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.
They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.
That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.
I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.
Carrying Light 