I wake with your feather weight along my sternum, papoosed across
My spine
I mourn my inability to save
You from this uncertain and inevitable
Loss
Take you with me everywhere
Haunt me, girl-child
Make me do
impossible things
for love
Long before our terrible story your birthday was already
the feast of Servites pruning winter roses. I cling to that now, all the other days this day could be:
Obstinate mountains lumber into obeisant seas
Lame men whole, blind men see
Dead men rise and shake off their shroudy bindings
impossible things all around ya
If only you will
See
I pull down the old book, look for recipes for cultivating children, like the time she sewed the earth with dragon’s teeth and made them into men…
I don’t want men
I want daisies
Dozens and dozens, hundreds and hundreds, legions and legions, fields upon fields
Filled with Bellis perennis–beauties everlasting
Because only God can
Make lasting
Children out of words
And wildflowers
They boarded the plane. Put their bags in overhead compartments. Scanned the list of drinks and snacks on what they thought would be a long flight. Buckled in the children. Watched the international pantomime for safety on an airplane. Assured flight attendants they were old enough for exit seats.
None of us are
Ready for the impact
The percussion, the fire, the fall
As though the story we had been always told about Icarus was a slanderous lie
He did not fly too close to the sun at all
No warning, no premonition, no string long enough to thread them free of
The labyrinth, the
Friendly fire
It is a line from a song sung by the super-heroic woman who can restore what has been lost or broken and I borrow it as I search for the little ones, so brave, so beloved
I want them all back, past undone
gordian-knotted he would say
Every family has a hot-head he would say
Oh my beautifuls,
All treasure
He says
We do things a little differently here
And I guess I didn’t see
How literally he meant it
the shady pecan, the shotgun shack
Give me
Give me
these tokens we have in our hands but cannot staunch
Such indelible grief
my little ones
all gone
You take the burn boat out
Should have been used to
Ferried day trippers
Or taken provisions for the larder
But not this–
Watch a man built then burn
His own funeral pyre
With the ease of a fraud or
Automaton
Feigning the act of breathing
In and
Out
Just to
fool us all.
Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
Try to survive today.
I once knew a man who said it should be the parable of the prodigal father, which, of course, is true. We are not very prodigal with much but our father’s treasure.
I have been the younger son. I have been the older son. Jesus knows that we are all really not great sons–judge-y or profligate or both, so he gives a story where the two great characters are an old man and a fatted calf.
The man who saves the world makes himself the main course at a feast thrown for a loser.
I am that loser. The shining moment of clarity in any human life is when we realize we are all the prodigal child.
And so we should know the rules for prodigals–
I have done nothing to deserve this inheritance I have squandered
I have made little account for the days my Father has grieved on my behalf
But he never stops hoping I will come home.
What pride, what fear, what foolishness can withstand the power of love?
Luke 15:17-20 KJV
[17] And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! [18] I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, [19] And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. [20] And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
Carrying Light 