in my head
I sing off-key
Pick through the rocks
On the steep uphill
Dark of course
Avoid the fruit
They say
I long to look
Behind me
Willing you be there still
As though a woman of no particular gifts
Could summon the missing
With scraps of broken notes
Strung together
After so long waiting
Wild hope
quietly emerges from the crowd
Some unnamed Jewish festival in Jerusalem
Near the Sheep Gate, of course
Where we
Lame, blind, and patently foolish
Lie prone, waiting for angels
Angels and the ghosts of gods
Occasionally
stir the waters
Every plural word written of
our collective loss
Reruns the ambiguity between
Our healing and our disgrace
Clouds in our eyes
We fail to
Drink such strong medicine
Poured out
For us
these ordinary words
Hewn from a tree
To the curve of the foot
Or simply endure
Itself a stone, a hard place
To be in the presence of God
As he dips the bread into wine
Supper of blood and agony
Last…
Supper
Day
Glimpse…
Of who we will be
The first and the last
The last shall be
First.
First you must know
The beautiful feat of God.
It has been almost a decade since my father died after his helicopter crashed on descent.
I still feel flashes of pain when I am reminded of that pain.
Ordinary haunting is a longterm normal for we who grieve.
The death of one man changes the world.
Evoking Jesus.
He took every crash, every act of misery and self-destruction. Drained the cup of history to the dregs of genocide, exploitation, war, famine, epidemic, deadly contagion.
Hell to pay for us. The wrath of holy Love, the grief of God poured out.
For us.
To atone for the transgressions of a single garden-variety human would be unwatchable, unlivable, unthinkable, unbearable– awful.
The ransom for all our billions is so beyond reckoning, we do not try.
But we should.
We should at least reckon the cost and the pain, fear, horror and brutality it took to redeem our ordinary wrongs-gluttony, lust, prejudice, and greed.
We should; we shall.
We will either be defined now by our debt to this Eternal Savior or we will be defined forever by the life we squandered at his great cost.
the car crash in slow motion
The snake coiled to strike the child
The mother seeing bad news
In the doctor’s eyes
Some moments are so unforgettably awful
The spirit rises out
Of the body, off to one side
Hovers over the disaster
Snapping shots of all the carnage
A heart just beginning to break
Operates differently than
One far gone into the cave of grief
the last evening you were mine
Was the first time you met
Your new mommy, new daddy
Strangers then
You were delivered back to me
Sleeping I sat with you in my arms
Time folded around us
Everything paused
For our unlikely pieta
I had just enough sense
to stop everything
just to be with you
A little longer
forgive me for that day in September when I wrapped you in a Mao-green papoose
Indescribable light
I understand we are only metaphors
Allegories
Parables
For feral mother love
Howl at the moon
Stalk the night forest
Accost the brothers Grimm
With the spindle-pierced grief
Through sinew and heart
I held on as long as I could
Then looked for you on each horizon
She-wolf helpless
Caught in the trap
Of human law
I am familiar with stolen
Children stolen names
Borrowed children stolen names
Borrowed stolen beautiful
Girl metonymy
Is when you
Become a face in a crowd
The crowd then becoming
You in every face
I have looked
You in every
Looked
Have
I
No.
Can’t do that or you will lose
Her you never truly
Had
Only a name
Crumpled broken paper fluttering down from the blown-apart skyscrapers which once defined our empire
Mushroom clouded elephantine weight falls to its knees
Compressed neutron star mother
Heart the size of a sugar cube
Weight of 300 million
Cars
On my chest
As I walk through the dark
Singing off-key these borrowed breakup songs
Fierce to the teeth
Lost until I know
You will be
Safe.
haunts me with her gray
Soul, robbed of light
Too young to ever choose this
She is a ghost
Who in all other aspects
Resembles me–
Breastplate taken in battle.
Which is why I see your face before
Me always
The iron bars invisible to all but
We two
Jailed by men with carved out hearts
I carry you, darling
Close to my own
Beg the God of air and light
To teach us how
To fly
Away from the shadows
Where ordinary humans claw and devour
All but unaware
They have bartered their own
Nearly extinguished
Eternal selves
For shreds of ashen dung
if you are
Obsessed with light
Then the darkness will stalk you
Apex predator night
Until you
Strike the first match
Chemical explosion
So small you might discount it
Unless…
lately I have begun to speculate
About the geographical location of
Peter in the hours of the crucifixion
Because I am a coward too
I want to say I would be
At the foot of the cross
But my feeble heart
Suggests otherwise
Snacking perhaps
On ancient Aramaic Oreos
In some forgotten corner of
The praetorium
During the inexplicable hours of
darkness
I would slide my helpless hands
Along this cavernous darkness/
The wound in his exposed chest
Grief an animal
Grasping for crumbs
In the dark heart of the world
Carrying Light 