We are all shadows, finding ourselves at loose ends behind unexpected doorways, always reckoning with the ghosts of younger selves accompanied by their shimmering, transformed companions
The dead, haloed in what they have become
Amphibian
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Category Archives: Poetry
The Ring Structure
I walk with the girl back across the highway in the dark, snow blankets everything, including the future, the loss of hope, the acquisition of children, the tiny individual snowflakes not unlike irreplaceable genetic components of life
She clears the windows of snow so the boy can drive to class in the morning…
What she doesn’t know won’t kill her, although fragments of conversations with oddly placed strangers are still defining
After all these years
The night is still cold, but cloudless this time, the moon looks on
Through the denuded branches of the tree the mourning doves have claimed
Leaving something besides snow to wipe aside, best I can, in the night
Your Eyes
If I had a magic mirror I would hand it to you
To see all those looks of repudiation
I don’t know her
I don’t want people to think she belongs with me
I don’t
See things the way you do
Matthew 26:70 NIV
[70] But he denied it before them all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
All the cities of the world
When you were my baby you were always amazing, beautiful, lovable. So much so that I would spontaneously think you had all the cities of the world in your eyes, or put another way– I would give all the cities of the world for you.
I remember when I found out that the people who were taking you from me had a story pock-marked by leaving the laws of love behind.
I worried. I grieved. How would they be there always for you? How could they be picked over me?!? Crazy, messy, overextended, underprepared me?
I got the phrase all the cities of the world from Matthew 4–two heavyweights bargaining over the fate of the world. One aims to buy back his lost love the hard way, the other is trying to get him to take a shortcut.
He doesn’t.
There are no shortcuts to love.
Hold on my dear heart, Rapunzel. Love has always been on your side, even when all this feels so broken.
The rightful King of the world loves you so very much.
The Dawn Wall
If I could talk to you still I would ask you do you lose any?
You find them, name them
Make lists of their special firsts
Fall in love with them
Make them kin
Search the sky when they go
up there, where only the brave go
Up the Dawn Wall
How to Clean a Toilet
Chose your words carefully
Remember both your predecessors and antecedents
While neither should define you, the latter may constrain your rightful impulse towards flight
Because sometimes silence
Because…sometimes silence
Hides terrible things.
A Normal Day
There have been other days when the sturm und drang of life has tipped the little ship, washing the sweet little sailors nearly overboard. But hopefully not today. Maybe a little–but only in the bottle where the boat stays now, carefully taken apart bit by bit, each then pushed one by one gingerly through only to be (who knows how) reassembled inside the bottle, so serene now, so still
All bottled up like that.
Moving Mountains
I have a hunch that when we get to Heaven we will realize that no matter how big, how wild, how impossible our prayers have been, we could have prayed for more.
Let me be clear: God does not answer prayers for evil. He does not reward our sin, cowardice, or avarice. He rewards the just, but if we pray along the lines of love, mountains do move.
Have you ever seen a mountain move? Have ever seen it lumber to the sea and toss itself in?
I have not. And as with these oh-so-solid mountains, many of the big-ticket items I have prayed for have been stolidly immobile for years.
Impossible things.
But I do worship the God of impossible things. His wry sense of humor, His unflagging love, His ridiculous, tenacious prophets, and His remarkable creation all suggest
Moving mountains ain’t no thing
For Him.
Fetal Position
Forebear all hymns, celebratory, solemn, or liturgical
Just wash the stuffed animal
Mammalian, maternal
Using sewn-on paws to clutch
a miniature version of herself
To her belly, too big for an ordinary machine, she curls without consent into
The grey plastic washtub
Fetal position
I think, anthropomorphizing
Everything
The Wedding Injunction
This is a box. Make 49 percent of it as nice as you want. (You will be lucky to have children there
And luckier still if you can survive what happens when they go)
try not to dwell on the made-up
World outside
Or how untenable it might be to try to keep all you hold dear
In a box.
Carrying Light 