you think Vikings
Drawn swords and treasure chests
In the strong man’s house
Who ties and binds matters
The scars on His wrists forever
I am the plunder
So grateful to be found
Restored eternal
From the house of the strong man
Strewn with bones and promises
Redeemed by this warrior
King
bring your lantern buckler
to the dawn gate
Where the night sky
holds on to the dark
Lift it high
Pray fire
for the dragon you have summoned
Knows all your gods
By name.
Words betray only the barest threads of love
“A mother for a child”
You must know I always
Wanted to keep the possessive
Pronoun “mine”
In our relationship
They took that from us
Let me see how
These tiny seeds of faith
Could move mountains
Losing sight of light to find it
Time makes
Trees from seeds/
Holes in the arms of love
I look for your face in every crowd
And the pictures you post to the world
Of a baby I once held
So dear, beautiful girl
So always, always dear
when the King arises
He runs to us
These words, weapons, shields
Tokens of splendor
Silver refined in the crucible
(For what is crucible but a fancy word for Cross?)
Gold fired seven
Times this burning
Brighter than the sun
Distill this ghost of a man
Standing close to a lone Word
Strong enough
To call him from the grave
Back to life
I have a friend who fights. She has brightly colored hand wraps that she uses to protect her hands beneath her boxing gloves.
She bandages each hand so that the knuckle is protected, the wrist and all the space in between.
When I have watched her wrap and unwrap her hands it has reminded me of Jesus.
I think of him as a baby. In the primitive conditions of his arrival, the Bible records his swaddling–wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.
Descriptions of ancient infant swaddling talk about cleaning the newborn with oil and salt, then wrapping the child in strips of torn cloth.
Lazarus was swaddled when he emerged from his tomb.
The ancients swaddled their newborns and their dead, wrapping both in the same strips of cloth, washing each for the journey ahead.
The story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany bears striking resemblance to his washing as a newborn and is a stated preparation for the soon-to-be swaddling of his dead body.
Three days is a long time to wait for a resurrection, four days is even longer. But for many of us 20, 30, or 40 years is how long we have waited for our dead to rise to life.
And if eternity is the span of human existence, then it is also the length of time we must measure each human soul, inside or outside our dark and solitary tombs.
To believe in the resurrection of the dead is to believe in the extreme triumph of Life over death, heaven over hell, good over bad.
To stand at the mouth of the tomb and know that someday each of us will be called to walk out of our tombs into Light.
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.
To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.
As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.
Few of us are. We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.
To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear.
Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.
We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.
We say to ourselves either–
I will not do this
Or…
I deserve…
It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine. Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have. Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.
But Someone always knows.
He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.
He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him
In the rictus of the Cross
In the jeers of the crowd
In the agony of physical abuse
In the final unbearable…
In the final unbearable He bore to make us
Faithful.
when discussing
Atrocity
I find that it is best to begin
With scenes (at least a single scene)
Of domestic tranquility–
A sister reads a children’s story to her little brothers who have memorized the words. They punctuate the story with lines of dialogue and laughter…
Because
If you do not see them–real
Alive
Vivid
Indelible
Then you won’t understand the tragedy when they go missing
Completely legally, of course
The voices in support of holocaust of one sort or another are always quick to point out
Everything they did to destroy the wee ones was completely legal
–The stripping of their rights
–The dehumanizing monikers
–The methodical pillaging of their history, family, identity
–The medical framing of their naked deaths
–The sanitized commodity of their skin, blood, stems, and cells
–The clinics where they do their tinkering
Piecemeal
Tiny pieces
–All government sanctioned
–Legal to trade in and cultivate small
Parts
Tell me again
How
Piles of skin and hair and blood
Can be so..
Bought and sold.
Where was the conference room? In what hotel?
They served a light
Lunch/over the topic
How to separate the spine of a…
living soul
The way a man would gut a fish
Like millions of other listeners, I have become deeply entrenched in Serial, an episodic treatment of the murder of Hae Min Lee in 1999.
The podcasts are mostly riveting and leave the listener grasping for answers.
But some things demand to be confronted emotionally, not just in the clinical language of forensics, but in the enduring vortex of loss and grief.
I have hunted for archival traces Hae Min Lee–glimpses of the girl from before her life taken and then reduced to jurisprudential conjecture.
Who was Hae Min Lee to those who loved her? A picture, a memorial–something. I found this– a piece on her memorial.
She played lacrosse…
left a grieving family…
…a family whose grief is indicated mostly by their present silence. Surely they would be appalled by the surgical reduction of this vivid girl to…a piece of evidence not properly disposed of.
I keep returning to the snowstorm; days her family must have spent hoping and praying for her safe return.
When she could not.
Would not.
Ever.
Because she had been rendered helpless, cold, and alone in the shallow grave, in the silence of falling snow.
It seems to me American justice requires a return to that quiet wood and all the things that were stolen from Hae Min Lee.
Perhaps we are all too accustomed to our fictional procedurals to realize that real crime leaves empty places in the heart and a grief that never lifts or relents.
Maybe splendor
Is a girl
Rowing her younger brother to the
Far shore
She tells him she he will be
A cowboy there
He asks her how he can be
Without a hat
She tells him
you will make one
From the twigs and branches
And leaves there
And you will have a cow you will name Horse and another named Ted or Fred, he said
Yes.
She says, and a chicken…now get your clothes and race me up the hill.
A chicken named
Get-your-clothes-and-race-me-up-the-hill,
Carrying Light 