never was
All that pretty
Never was
All that good
Never did
Believe in romance
Never will
Leave alone
Letting Go
Reply
Pictures in the wind
I have a tennis ball, Gatorade bottle top, and an ailing succulent in front of my house.
For three very different reasons I will need to move them soon. I haven’t yet because I am lazy.
Lazy, and prone to markers in the wind.
Leaves fall and God says I love you.
Rubber bands, hair bands, flossers, and pennies are flotsam God sends to us in the unlikeliest of places–I love you.
Considering that we are puny and mean and He is the God of the infinite universe, His extravagant love notes are bewildering and lovely.
People can be love notes as well. The baby singing in the car, children building sand castles, anyone doing anything brave and true–I love you.
Do you know He loves you? Do you look for signs of Him in the world?
To paraphrase the famous conversation from The Count of Monte Cristo–even if you don’t believe in Him, He believes in you.
Rape Case in Brooklyn
The case shocked when it was first reported–a man sought help for his daughter who was being sexually assaulted in a Brooklyn park.
The story began to break into pieces within a week of its appearance. The victim was consenting? The victim had been having sex with her father!?
Ugh.
Most of us are done by this point in the story. Too much creepy.
The young woman refused to “do court” and the charges against all of her sexual partners fell apart.
Which leaves several salient questions–
How safe and child-friendly are parks in Brooklyn?
Why were no lesser charges pursued against any of the principals? Public lewdness? Indecency? Incest?
And last–(the one which concerns me the most) what will become of these people?
Especially the young woman.
The explanation of her behavior includes a life of foster care and group homes, a fundamental disconnection from her biological family–a father who could be called predatory at best.
With no more pieces of a biography than that I would hazard that she has attachment disorder, a syndrome caused by neglect and a lack of attachment bonding in babies and young children.
The question of what happens to the adult victims of attachment disorder plagues me because my adopted children have it.
None of us may want to face what happened in that park that night, but we should all question what will happen to her?
How do you teach a woman her own worth or the value of a father who protects his daughter instead of exploiting her?
And what of the men in this story? Each put a biological function of his anatomy over the last shred of his humanity.
My adopted daughter complains that I am not to be trusted because I judge people for things like this.
I would argue that one can only trust those who are willing to judge these things.
It ain’t love if you don’t keep all the little girls (lost or otherwise)…
Safe
At night
In the parks of Brooklyn.
Ordinary Sadness
I am grateful for the rain
On this dry patch of earth
I know the difference between
Accidents and miracles
And wish to thank
The God of ordinary sadness
Who sits next to me
on the sinking-in-the-middle
Patched-with-a-heart
-on-the-back
$35 couch
Willing to abide in the center
Of my vertiginous grief
He says
Take courage
It is I
Do not be afraid
Swaddling Clothes
I have a friend who fights. She has brightly colored hand wraps that she uses to protect her hands beneath her boxing gloves.
She bandages each hand so that the knuckle is protected, the wrist and all the space in between.
When I have watched her wrap and unwrap her hands it has reminded me of Jesus.
I think of him as a baby. In the primitive conditions of his arrival, the Bible records his swaddling–wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.
Descriptions of ancient infant swaddling talk about cleaning the newborn with oil and salt, then wrapping the child in strips of torn cloth.
Lazarus was swaddled when he emerged from his tomb.
The ancients swaddled their newborns and their dead, wrapping both in the same strips of cloth, washing each for the journey ahead.
The story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany bears striking resemblance to his washing as a newborn and is a stated preparation for the soon-to-be swaddling of his dead body.
Three days is a long time to wait for a resurrection, four days is even longer. But for many of us 20, 30, or 40 years is how long we have waited for our dead to rise to life.
And if eternity is the span of human existence, then it is also the length of time we must measure each human soul, inside or outside our dark and solitary tombs.
To believe in the resurrection of the dead is to believe in the extreme triumph of Life over death, heaven over hell, good over bad.
To stand at the mouth of the tomb and know that someday each of us will be called to walk out of our tombs into Light.
We are fire
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Unfaithful
Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.
To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.
As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.
Few of us are. We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.
To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear.
Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.
We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.
We say to ourselves either–
I will not do this
Or…
I deserve…
It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine. Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have. Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.
But Someone always knows.
He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.
He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him
In the rictus of the Cross
In the jeers of the crowd
In the agony of physical abuse
In the final unbearable…
In the final unbearable He bore to make us
Faithful.
War Paint/Girlchild
I have a friend who punctuates correspondence with the lovely benediction–know you are loved.
Elegant, but a bit abstract for some of us.
I love you–more direct, but can you believe me?
Sometimes celebrity can be a strong drug. Knocking out some of our healthy need for solitude, privacy, anonymity, and humility.
When you lost the fight with Holms I grieved with you. Her win was methodical and clearly well-thought out. But some of us love you for your slugger’s heart.
You did not need to hide your scars on the way home. We all have them.
Glory in the well-earned blows.
But watch out for the body paint. SI has been treating legit female athletes like sex doll pin-ups for years. Playing to the testosterone of their average-joe readers is not good enough anymore.
Women like you deserve to have the paint of your fame be in each well-fought achievement.
Not your sex appeal.
Keep your clothes on and fight girl. Know you are loved.
Love Don’t Say
love don’t say
Whatevs, Girl
Love plays for keeps
Wraps itself around the words and places where you been
Leaves the have out on purpose
Because when you were young, you…
But when you are old you will..
Know this loss
Feel what it is
To not be found
Without you, Girl
“Completely Legal”
when discussing
Atrocity
I find that it is best to begin
With scenes (at least a single scene)
Of domestic tranquility–
A sister reads a children’s story to her little brothers who have memorized the words. They punctuate the story with lines of dialogue and laughter…
Because
If you do not see them–real
Alive
Vivid
Indelible
Then you won’t understand the tragedy when they go missing
Completely legally, of course
The voices in support of holocaust of one sort or another are always quick to point out
Everything they did to destroy the wee ones was completely legal
–The stripping of their rights
–The dehumanizing monikers
–The methodical pillaging of their history, family, identity
–The medical framing of their naked deaths
–The sanitized commodity of their skin, blood, stems, and cells
–The clinics where they do their tinkering
Piecemeal
Tiny pieces
–All government sanctioned
–Legal to trade in and cultivate small
Parts
Tell me again
How
Piles of skin and hair and blood
Can be so..
Bought and sold.
Where was the conference room? In what hotel?
They served a light
Lunch/over the topic
How to separate the spine of a…
living soul
The way a man would gut a fish
Carrying Light 