Come, girl, let us pause and make sandcastles in the dust where once there were courts of stone, because kings may come to tear down both walls and doors, regard or disregard our little lives, take stones one from another and make each a witness
what door will you keep then, when the one true King has passed us by and taking in his wake all love, leaving us without our voices to praise him or call out? Let stones cry out if we do not
Let the doors we have kept keep us instead
John 18 KJV
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children
If only an ordinary person like me could
Cast a spell with words
Hocus pocus–live!
Abracadabra–live!
I alternate between believing
That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or
The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing
Calvariums.
I draw from memory, with sticks of charcoal, which smudges like the dickens! The figure has the messy edges of your ordinary unfinished sketch, work-in-progress, might-never-be-finished
Angel just means messenger and
We mortals are
from dust, and dust return,
Until such piercing Light
Outshines all
That came before.
I might as well be a canine companion
In this ritual of carefulness
Wash the shoes, spray them with bleach, stuff the scrubs into the drum of the machine, always use extra detergent
Spin out
Then dry on the line
Everything sanitized
In this intense, summer light
When the older brother lifts his little brother up
So high in the air
above the dock, out into the deep river
Light scatters everywhere
And I think
You are my magical and amazing Older brother
Giving me, your little sister,
Flight
Like never reading the love letters I wrote you
Words scattered all around
Like never seeing how
I let the blazing suns of a thousand remote
Solar systems blink your name
Like ignoring the food on your plate
The clothes neatly folded and pressed
The hands that kept you there
Breathing in, breathing out, wanton flowers
The messages painted on the billboard of the world
Child come home,
Rain come down
I’ll never stop looking
Across this field for you
Job 38:1-7 KJV
[1] Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, [2] Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? [3] Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. [4] Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. [5] Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? [6] Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; [7] When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
At first I cajole them, tell them their wisps stretch out like the spines and wings of angels and dragons, I compare them one to another–formidable strangers towering in sun-soaked splendor,
But when they keep back the rain, it is I who begins to storm, arms stretched and gesticulating wildly
Speak! I say
Rain! I say
Like the petulant child I am
Stomping my feet in anger,
As though that could work
As though it might just
Bring more than stray showers
He is gone now
Gone to me, anyway
But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–
Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended
What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair
Forever/
Just
… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes
All your regrets all your missed chances
To cry like a baby
Wail for a Savior
Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent
Shaken finally by what you
Would have been without Him
Carrying Light 