Voice in your head
Kinda sounds like you but…
Kinder, wiser, more forgiving
Bright penny on the ground
In the most unlikely places
A posse of leaves long wrung from living limbs
Dance, alive in the winter wind
Sing your name
No matter
A big impossible
Promise unless it is Truth
Kind that sets a body free
Not unlike those ephemeral leaves
Dry bones
Bits of things found
In the unlikeliest places
Love will find you
No matter what.
They emerged from an ordinary
van
…wore ordinary clothes
shuffled toward me along uneven
lines
squinting, sun-struck
I realized: Magi!
come close enough for
greetings and salutations
along the usual
Lines of dignitaries and princes-
Hands shaken; eyes met
they said oh, it is you!
(Me?) their honored guest?
regretting I had no
Gold, frankincense, myrrh to give them
Come so far we all are
children of the King.
Just an ordinary looking guy with an odd refugee backstory who comes along, works with wood, talks some smack, heals the crowd, dies for all, inexplicably
Rises again.
The end-the beginning
for all of us.
The monkey tribe grieves
over the prone body of what is actually just
A robot baby
while across the globe in human cities
woman rage and tear
Euphemistic offspring from their own
wombs
Run, human child, to the relative kindness
of other mammal mothers
who would never, ever
do these terrible things
to even the semblance of
their own young.
her voice is metallic-insistent-succinct
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Thank God she is there
10 dollar angel
suspended above us while we sleep
…when we sleep
You know it took me years to know You did that
And then years again to know few others did.
Vigilant love, calling us out of darkness
where angels who watch over us if we
had eyes to see
Always resemble the Firstborn
Fill the sky with light
Ring the children with wings and eyes
And teach them how to vanquish
Implacable darkness
with words of supplication
to the fierce Unstoppable
God of Light.
Bet everybody loves a good
love story
Boy meets girl or something…
Only that is not enough
You once asked me if there were monkey bars that went all around the world
Could you do it?
I could do the math
24,901 miles around
Oddly specific last mile the hardest
Arms tired by the miles of
Arm-swing-leg-swing-hang repeat
131,477,280 bars
Feet
Hands and arms so tired
After an eternal day in the sun
The girl is such an ordinary thing
But the boy is one-of-a-kind
Worth looking for
The man who could, would, did and shall
Make this love story
Luminous.
In deep winter
she chooses to suspend
All the ordinary chores
Drags a heavy fishing net to the belly
of this man-made stream
Feet first into
cold deep
Swims upstream
where they wait for her
bobbing on the water
snagged by the naked
limbs of winter branches
An old oil can, adorned with red duct tape,
several empty beer bottles,
torn flotational device,
And a veritable tableau of shirts and trousers
Snagged on naked limbs
then animated by the wind
Once carefully extricated
she lines the children up by year, gender, alleged disability
Names them back to life
So they can indeed
Fly, flock of winter birds
to inauguration.
Sit with me
On the bench in the park
In the imaginary world where
Children are always
safe and well
In the heart of the tribe of small
voices call out
hide-and-seek–freeze tag–the ground is lava
As If I could still draw you close
Say I am sorry
say I know you tried
Perhaps in every way they tell you to-
Words written and spoken
Smoke signals and semaphore
Emptied root beer bottles corked with words of loss
Come to a premature
Conclusion.
In an already messy old house
I try to find a place to stash my anger
The beat-up old chest?
Grandma’s dresser?
Each place I go I feel your loss
The way a tall boy once held a short girl at arm’s length
As she beat at the air with rage and sorrow
Maybe it is the air that is the problem…
Not enough oxygen?
The matrix of maternal affection somehow dislodged by
Something?
Something missing.
It is as though the lost girls had become those things-
A trunk, a cup, a worn blanket
Trapped in closets
…in the minds of monsters
The old childhood nightmare turned on its head-
The child in the closet
The mother, the monster
Shaking its imaginary head
“Even I could not
Would not
Do something so unspeakable
To a human child.”
When I was a foster parent in Beaver, PA in the late 1990s I was devastated to uncover adoptions going on in contravention of law and decency.
Some of the cases were covered by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 48 Hours. The ACLU sued the county.
The state did nothing.
One wonders if Grace Parker and her birth family were victims of the same kind of nefarious adoption scheme?
Horrible to think that the serious, maybe illegal actions of child welfare agencies are thoroughly shielded by confidentiality laws.
Even more horrible to think that Sara Packer may have used the federal money given to her to provide for Grace to buy the cat litter they used to disguise her murder.
Carrying Light 