It is a line from a song sung by the super-heroic woman who can restore what has been lost or broken and I borrow it as I search for the little ones, so brave, so beloved
I want them all back, past undone
gordian-knotted he would say
Every family has a hot-head he would say
Oh my beautifuls,
All treasure
What if God were just twice as smart as you? Twice as nice. Twice as precise. Would you worry then, Darling?
Worry about the things He would tell you
Before, not after, the flood
The possibility of both
Righteous anger and a casual
Ordinary
Blast of glory
Refuting all the
niggling details of narcissism
And all your little monsters
Eyeing you hungrily from their corners
Waiting to take all
The clues, the love-notes, the blazing stars
He has strewn about this place
Only hope for
Ransom.
Have there ever been friars here? Or caballos en el potrero, chico? I don’t know, I am afraid of this cathedral mountain, stone sacristy and holy of holies, a Wonder Wall above the pools, a picnic area where
Light would dwell
Among us
Who can dig and scrape and cajole this stone, this path? Light the wave, the pulse, the metaphor, the insistent presence, and somewhere, somehow we use it to call out to each other these great distances between
With news I do not want to substantiate
We will all break like waves
into light
Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
If I were to write a book of fiction for my children I would construct people for them, community, a family, let’s say, a big, sprawling, messy family
Maybe they would live next to some kind of river
Maybe the dogs would talk or the fish would taste like brightly colored jello confections.
Or maybe these fictional people, these purely hypothetical people, would just be back up
The silhouetted figures you might see on the crest of the hill above the sycamore tree as the sun sets
After the dam breaks
When they-you-we
Might need the vigilant ones
The most.
Years ago a man who fought fire told me that the hot center of it is black, vortex dark, a hole you could fall into and never stop
Falling
There is no fire without burning, I tell the children, each sun a metaphor for something
Something bigger than us
Something bigger than them
Than all the worlds of burning
Light reaching back to us
Saying something
Maybe in Morse code
Flashlit messages exchanged through neighboring windows by children in the night
You are…eternal
We are eternal, they are eternal, I tell her, but I know that there is something else, the purest kind of paradox, or is it tautology? Etiology? The woman in the park, on the streets, flagging down motorists, in the parking lots of churches, where people congregate like flocks of birds, always, always asking this uncomfortable question–
When was your last normal day? When was your last normal day?
When? When the truth
Stalks in
Wide awake
He says that I have lost my chance with him, as though he is a lottery ticket torn from my grasp by a strong wind in a storm, fluttering away with its winning numbers and it promise of untold riches.
I have lost my chance with him.
A week ago I stood in the Salvation Army and showed my youngest daughter a tee shirt–got love? Become a foster parent.
Her face clouds. Her life was radically altered by my decision to foster parent.
You had your chance with me…
He was small and scratched his face into bloody tiger stripes, he did not speak at almost two years of age. He did not potty train until just before kindergarten. He once desecrated a couch in a strange feral way.
The stories of my chances with him could fill terrible books.
I get it kid, you have a new god now.
But I am haunted by what will happen to you if you don’t have the guts to contemplate
The hell you unleashed on all of us and all it’s damning consequences.
I once knew a man who said it should be the parable of the prodigal father, which, of course, is true. We are not very prodigal with much but our father’s treasure.
I have been the younger son. I have been the older son. Jesus knows that we are all really not great sons–judge-y or profligate or both, so he gives a story where the two great characters are an old man and a fatted calf.
The man who saves the world makes himself the main course at a feast thrown for a loser.
I am that loser. The shining moment of clarity in any human life is when we realize we are all the prodigal child.
And so we should know the rules for prodigals–
I have done nothing to deserve this inheritance I have squandered
I have made little account for the days my Father has grieved on my behalf
But he never stops hoping I will come home.
What pride, what fear, what foolishness can withstand the power of love?
Luke 15:17-20 KJV
[17] And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! [18] I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, [19] And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. [20] And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
The girl-child mama ties her daughters to her–kites, they rise
Aloft in the summer breeze
Curl, swirl, dip, and sing
Bird-children
While faraway grandmother
Ponders apogee
The furthest point one can be from another.
Carrying Light 