Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy o… : American Journal of Therapeutics
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He never had a proper name, although for some reason I think someone called him Pedro. He sang Jesus loves me with gusto and I can still see him briefly free and more than a little outmanned, a green feathery bundle on the avenida on Fort Amador when he had sprung his cage
I scooped him up and took him home
No matter what happened after, he was mine
The river hunter is
Undeniably majestic
Swooping down and
Hitting the water with ballistic force
Often to rise empty-taloned
This time though
It catches a silvery fish
Glinting in its grip, in a dying sun
The first lap the osprey skims just above the water
As though the weight of the fish is too much
Then back and forth
Back and forth in high parabolic circles
Almost as though this were something other than
The dying fish’s first and last
Flight
At times I go back and parse
The pain, the bone-deep ache
The fever, chills, fatigue
The way it felt like constant, relentless muggings committed by tiny, unseen assailants
No hunger
A brief sense of being untied from all ordinary things
As though powerlessness could be construed as
Super-heroic
At first I thought it was my age, that some magic threshold of peri-menopausal bliss had been breached and entered and that the clumps of hair went with the hot flashes and wrinkles. Then a survivor 20 years my junior told me she was struggling with hair loss and it occurred to me that perhaps it was one more Covid peculiarity?
I think I am handling it well. I have trimmed the remaining locks by inches and let its spun lightness rule the day.
I am alive
Fairly unassuming manufactured house on the dog-leg routine to the store I didn’t even want to go to when…
Stone lions, like the ones I knew in China
Ushering in a succession of small wonders–Hello Kitty car curled behind a fence, two separate seahorse bird baths
All of these unassuming houses
Pocked with wonder
There is a story Luke tells about Joseph and Mary assuming somehow that Jesus was in their large family group as they returned from Jerusalem the year he was 12. It is the last chronological reference to Joseph. It raises legitimate questions about either their parenting or the point at which a boy was considered an independent in their culture. Both probably.
But more than that it was a handful of days where the Messiah was the Messiah in full public views. He said and did and was who he always was and always would be. Luke writes that the people he interacted with acknowledged his mastery of the subject at hand.
Why is this story here? Why aren’t there a million others? I want to know what Jesus ate for breakfast every day, not to mention what he said those days, years before his public ministry.
And I want to know more about his interlocutors. What did they gather from their
Brief encounter with the Philosopher King?
Long before her son’s whirling and untimely demise, my paternal grandmother believed in her traction with elected officials. I remembered this belief upon my first campaign, which was, parenthetically, about the loss of a single child and an unjust judge.
Who save me
would draw a line between Mamaw and the rise and fall of Hasmonean kings?
Amidst all this talk of unjust judges and rising kings
I tell myself there must be
sycamores in Jerichos still
Awaiting His return
I believe that
Raccoons see you as the Mama Raccoon
Dogs see you as their alpha
But I see you at the head of the old stone table
A wry look on your face
As though I could ever be
More than your little girl, oh
God of the Universe
You spread out this invitation
To partake in your matchless
grace
