Category Archives: history

Minotaur

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these stories we tell

of bartering children for the status quo

are older than the Minotaur 

dark, iconic monster

who most resembles our complacency

As long as the child sent into the labyrinth is not my own

we mutter, a sotto voce offering

To the god of what it would cost to save them all

He, unlike the Minotaur, is a natty dresser

With advanced degrees and a split-level colonial

He tsk-tsks about the rising price of safety

Rams our collective shame into his artisanally-crafted

Italian briefcase

pets his children and standard

Poodle 

with the same idle indifference 

Ignoring the growing sport 

Of hunting children

In the labyrinthine

minds of men who have traded 

The suffering of this human child

For their own eternal 

Souls.

Kites

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the lines we draw in the sand 

between alive and not as blurred

by these arbitrary atoms

configured into blood or bone

iterations of shell

crushed and altered by

lunar whim

the two abuelas lift la vieja

Under her

Right and left pits

she, swallowed up whole by the big

white shirt 

all three women lay on hands,

Lean in 

As we shield our eyes 

Look up 

Beneath the sun

the kite snaking ceaselessly over our heads

Paper-thin, it whips back and forth

Surely alive?

“Kite” is just 

A name 

Predatory bird with a haunting call

No more than a child’s toy

Perhaps we are all kites, then

The wind moves where it wills, but…

The old woman rises suddenly

Twine hastily tied to her waist

As the wind pulls her up

Those she loves

Upturn their faces 

Squint to make her out

Paper-thin

Unspooling toward the sun

Berlin Heart

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Only the best are chosen

to man this ship 

Sinking 

with its nuclear core

whether it is true or not 

I picture the submarine, home in the deep

sea inexplicably punctuated by

Bits of blinking light 

Windows, a wrap-around porch, 

(entirely decorative) men

Tiny inside

Atoms knit of blood and bone

All the oceans of the world reduced

To a thimble full of water amidst the stars

This metal vessel,

This Berlin heart,

Resuscitate us, sinking fast 

without You.

Among the Dead

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just moments before the blast

There were only living

Breathing children, women, men including

one who knew the truth about the vest,  the explosives

wrapped around the heart

of time about to turn

A wedding into a bouquet of broken 

Body parts everywhere the survivors said

The ones who could still talk

remember the calamitous before and after

But few will acknowledge the lie at the heart 

of the chest-wired-to-slaughter 

-grim wedding of deadly injunctions-

You, child, whatever they promised you they had no

right to say these empty things

Imposters all scorch, blood, and bone

Before the implacable throne of the hereafter

Trauma Litany

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I have swaddled my hands, wrapping the knuckles and the wrists, the wrists, palms, and knuckles again until they are bound.  Then I have pushed these bound, mummified fists into gloves curved, padded, slightly weighted.

I don’t swing at people.  I have, I can, but when I do I hold back, talk too much through my mouthguard, obsess about trauma.

Agent-causing-trauma.  I-am-the-agent-causing-trauma.

On the bag I do not hold back.  I aim for speed then alternate with power punches, slugging at the heavy, impassive face of a leather bag filled with sand or rags.  Its resolute, anthropomorphized gut, its impassive reserve.

I do not worry unduly about traumatizing the bag.  I can–am allowed to–wail on it in repeated, staccato acts of catharsis.

Because of trauma.

Because when you live long enough you have stories.

Stories linked to the pain of a very broken world.

The puzzle of trauma is the why and the injustice.

So I will call the why the jab and I will call the injustice the cross.

You see where I am going with this–the cross.  The strong-right-arm move of a superhero God.

Whose go-to power punch so far was allowing the trauma to wash over him.

The trauma of the trial.

The trauma of the desertion.

The trauma of the betrayal.

The trauma of the kangaroo court.

The trauma of the beating.

The trauma of the spitting, the mocking, the shame.

The trauma of power in the hands of bad men.

The trauma of the broken-hearted God.

The trauma of the family.

The trauma of the thorns.

The trauma of the nakedness.

The trauma of the carried weight.

The trauma of the pierced extremities.

The trauma of the hours.

The trauma of each breath.

The trauma of blood loss.

The trauma of being forsaken.

The trauma of out-poured wrath.

The trauma of the grave.

The trauma of hell entire.

The prophet Zechariah gives us a picture of how we will respond to this trauma–

They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child

This litany of blows.  This way that we must walk through the swaddling, the trauma, the raw lonely pain.

Because when He said it is finished, He meant it.  In the oddest k-o win ever, the victor takes the blows, both jab and cross and appears to lose it all only to give each of us the power to 

Fight trauma

Oh-Rescuer-God-

Jesus.


Chimera Gastrulation

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Words matter, mainly because they stand for something meaningful.  For instance, if you call genocide “the great solution,” or “living space” it is still really just genocide, but the strange, deforming euphemisms you have thrown up in front of the horror of murder might confuse the dim or comfort the monstrous.

So, for instance, if you call an unholy mixing of embryo parts from two species, one human, one not, a chimera and you call the embryo parts gastrulation, and you leave out any issue of obtaining consent from the very small and then you leave out the part about keeping these living entity for endless experimentation then destroying them.

Even then it sounds unbearable.

Some things we should not do not just because they are monstrous and destructive.  Some things we should not do because they make us monsters of destruction.

Funeral

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Weddings are such artificial confections, but all funerals have a unifying element of truth–we are all prone to die.

The manner and time vary, the seeming finality does not.

Unless…

Unless Jesus is right.  Unless He is the resurrection and the life.  In that case the things we take for granted about the finality of the grave may not be all there is.

I went to a funeral recently.  An untimely one.  The priest gave the family a final story from Acts 3–the silver and gold I have none story.

Only he did not tell it right.  Instead of the healing of the beggar and his resultant joy–physical, exuberant, unmissable dancing and jumping! The priest says that Peter says he will be there and pray.

Don’t get me wrong–Christians being there and praying is getting to be miraculous and rare, it just isn’t what Peter said or did.  At least not all he did.

The thing that Peter did for the beggar was public, miraculous, transforming, and unmistakable.

And powerfully reminiscent of his Master.  When Peter heals the beggar he signals that we are in AD now.  He lets us know that any narrative that portrays Jesus just another victim of Roman torture is incomplete. 

He lets us know that the flood of the miraculous has gushed into the ordinary.

A flood that should wash through every wedding and every funeral with the insistent song of redemption and resurrection and eternity.

Nothing quiet here.

U.S.S. Indianapolis 

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used to be an ordinary name

A ship, an honor, champagne broken across the bow?

The rules change in war

Sharks in the water

Pick men off one by one

Hope mixed with hunger thirst despair

A hell of a lot of

Time, minutes, seconds, days 

Become this feeding frenzy

No one is coming.



*What is so compelling and unthinkable about the sinking of the Indianapolis is that there were men who knew it was missing and men who received the distress signals.

For a variety of typically human reasons not a single one acted.

Resulting in the deaths of hundreds.