I break the second commandment all the time, sow dragon’s teeth in this suburban front yard, draw the greenest leaves down and through my fingers loosing embryo acorns and the shifting compass of the setting sun. It is the girls who say these most beautiful things, white linen things pinned to a line and lifted by the wind beneath a slivery moon
“It looks like a stone rolled away
Like a stone in the very act of being
Rolled away”
Matthew 2:1,2 and 28:1,2
What if all that was left was
Bad love songs?
You would say
Fold them, Darling, fold them all into
Flocks and flocks of perfect
Origami birds
Ink dot eyes unblinking, still
As they wait as long as it takes to hear
The bridegroom’s voice
Calling them to wing, to rise
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
The hole in my chest has opened up again
Opened up
The whole in my chest is blown apart
Blown apart again
The tree abandoned by the river asks for something
Water or some proof
Some proof of all
made whole once
once again
I have tried to write us into the third person for this Passover mitzvah
He for you, she for me
“Do you take this man? Do you take this woman?”
Some iteration of a
long-ago covenant made and broken in a garden
Careful to avoid her gaze as you give her sour fruit
Mixed with all the other intentional elements of our redemption
She lames her ankle on the descent, finds her ever-less-corporal-self still bound by grief and pain as the light cotton shift falls to her feet
You must shower, girl, leave all the light behind
And enter into this entirely different kind of
Love story
Walk ahead, don’t look back
Never let him know how much it costs to stay
Inside the dark box of the bet he lost
For both of you
I once knew a man who was a dogged optimist, or so it seemed at the time. Sure, he spoke of darkness, but he spread a sunny optimism in every conversation he had.
Which meant that when the shadow of the Cross loomed large over us all
He had no answer
Isaiah 58
From the beginning I have only been able to see them as tiny iterations of Calvin–the cartoon, not the moral philosopher.
They lie prone in upended rows in a hand-drawn version of
The antithesis of a maternity ward
Rows of neatly labeled, perfect and tiny, dinner roll backs, so prone, exposed
No skin gun can ever save us now
For months now I have walked carefully, gingerly, with the rocking gait of the elderly, infirmed, or, in my case, feet surreptitiously lamenting for the loss of the whole–
broken heart
crepe-fine skin
Liver, spleen, lungs, and stomach all exposed
As the obligate carnivores we tended as children stalk the house now
Grown
Larger than life,
Pacing hungrily to and fro
As we eye them in dismay
Their pets now
I want rudimentary shelving in the wild backyard for the Walmart canoes
I want an art table
And an extra large button-down shirt with flecks of paint already on it
I want a shelter for the sun and shelter for the darkness
I want the trees to grow up around us, ramparts
And the tiny praying mantis to have a disproportionate number of siblings
Rain, so the river can rise above the exposed and naked roots of the
Already. Dying.
Carrying Light 