Tara Lynn Badamo

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Elea Lee

Whether you cast back all the way to their respective birth announcements or race forward to their untimely deaths, my two friends share bits of biography, outsiders in a world full of the ambivalent. So it surprises me that it took so long to realize the next step in my own apparitional grief was to see them together at the table I told you about before…

In the unassuming kitchen of God

Singing-

someone is in the kitchen with Dinah, someone is in thekitchen I kno-ooow!

“Tara” for “Dinah” and capitalize the “Someone” and you get the picture-

He talks beauty and parable

All tears wiped away.

One Thing

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Elea Lee

The lady in the picture is a fraction of her whole-a bit of glasses, hair like mine. Did she shape the assignment or was it the Wizard of Oz for freshman comp? I don’t know, but as with so many words shaped into injunctions it sticks in my craw–pick the one thing? Not a good thing? Not one among brothers? I suspect literary ambush, which then feels like literary paranoia, but I kick around/go into the weeds with this one thing-

You. You are the one thing. The voice in my head steadying my coward’s heart. My man, Jesus I tell Madeline about that universal division of time into before and after You.

Like if you believed in evolution it would be 50 billion, million zillion years BCE, and those sylphish, wispy 2000 after.

After you.

Let me just

Tag along after you

Big brother

Strong tower

Never-leave-me God

No matter what…

Posted on July 23, 2017 by Elea Lee

I will.

Be there.

For you.

No matter what…

J. crashes the party

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Elea Lee

If you asked me how I knew it was you I would touch your face and say aardvarks!! Anteaters!! Warthogs!! Your humor as unmistakable as your wit, odd they all refuse to see you, you in the over-sized retro flippers, ducky float ring and wild Hawaiian print crashing the party, the holiday, the cozy churchy potluck making almost everyone supremely uncomfortable. Everyone except the children who delight in your flamboyant honesty, your failure to adhere in any way to our sheepy ways, shorn and alone

You hand off the flowery shirt, the float, the flippers (none of which you ever needed)

seamless garment to sunblind guards

World go dark, pain and love

Set free

Brace yourself

Posted on March 5, 2017 by Elea Lee

Comfort girl myself

I rifle through the postcards from

The places you have been

Looking for things you loved

Always people, always broken

Then strain to hear your voice

As you tell them about the Luke 13 people

All dead, all tragic until you

direct our eyes into the deep

Pool of Siloam, reflected the tower before it fell?

Did the blind man know it was there before he could

See you standing there

Across the street from all my loneliness

Beckon me come close

Brace yourself, Love

Dissembling Wrong

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Elea Lee

So close

to a reclusive keeper

of memories, of wrongs

Shuffling among the forgotten objects

Placeholders for the barely living:

anonymous empty

water bottles, hollow and crumpled

Become the jury

Old newspapers still swaddled in

Their plastic rain protectors

Told to be

Witnesses or spectators

Instructed to rise

As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench

Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings

Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while

the defense attorney was appointed from among the

A pantheon of generic

Happy Meal toys.

But the victims are living songbirds

Twittering in the disheveled

cage of my heart of course

Always re-animating dried bones-

Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs

Will inexorably be

Radically, fundamentally transformed

When the true King

Calls them back

To life

Love Will Find You

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Elea Lee

Voice in your head

Kinda sounds like you but…

Kinder, wiser, more forgiving

Bright penny on the ground

In the most unlikely places

A posse of leaves long wrung from living limbs

Dance, alive in the winter wind

Sing your name

No matter

A big impossible

Promise unless it is Truth

Kind that sets a body free

Not unlike those ephemeral leaves

Dry bones

Bits of things found

In the unlikeliest places

Love will find you

No matter what.

Elevator Pitch Savior

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Elea Lee

Just an ordinary looking guy with an odd refugee backstory who comes along, works with wood, talks some smack, heals the crowd, dies for all, inexplicably

Rises again.

The end-the beginning

for all of us.

“There’s no base!”

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Elea Lee

“there’s no base!”

Exclaimed the girl–green shirt, tiny dog resembling a toy…

only real in the crook of her arm

And suddenly I get atheism–

Darwin shouts in the schoolyard–

no base!

And unhinging the game from…

well, base-

Another name for

The trunk of the branching oak

we rest beneath

breathing hard

before someone says

One, two, three, get off my father’s apple tree

Not to be confused with

That one inimitable player who says

One, two, three, base all over me

And somehow, miraculously

Means it.

Cry Fire

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Elea Lee

her voice is metallic-insistent-succinct

Fire! Fire! Fire!

Thank God she is there

10 dollar angel

suspended above us while we sleep

…when we sleep

You know it took me years to know You did that

And then years again to know few others did.

Vigilant love, calling us out of darkness

where angels who watch over us if we

had eyes to see

Always resemble the Firstborn

Fill the sky with light

Ring the children with wings and eyes

And teach them how to vanquish

Implacable darkness

with words of supplication

to the fierce Unstoppable

God of Light.

Carrying Light

Words for light

Tag Archives: Jesus