I break the second commandment all the time, sow dragon’s teeth in this suburban front yard, draw the greenest leaves down and through my fingers loosing embryo acorns and the shifting compass of the setting sun. It is the girls who say these most beautiful things, white linen things pinned to a line and lifted by the wind beneath a slivery moon
“It looks like a stone rolled away
Like a stone in the very act of being
Rolled away”
Matthew 2:1,2 and 28:1,2
Of course, neither of us chew
scoop cold water to our waiting lips
In the congregation of those
Waiting for bright sunlight
Resurrection
6 minutes to Ballinger, Texas I missed you. Not possessing the ability to stop all the clocks, I watched windmills instead, recording the flat, hot, windy stretch of road while the Catholic radio station came in so clear with words of uneven comfort. I picture you a Ghibli bride, birdcage veil like Jackie Kennedy, always dainty, smallest, sweetest bouquet of flowers held between your front two paws as you proceed toward our mutual Savior, unswerving in his gaze.
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
Close to
La noche de Los muertos
I open the
Faraday box
Keep one leg out, door ajar,
Bit of light
Lent by a friend
You inhabited when
The world was still
An old wine skin
Blood and Spirit
I tell myself this
New litany of
Places for the dead
Who will all
rise
Because of you
They kept it
sealed for centuries
Told ourselves we could
be tourists there
Run our mortals’ hands along the stone
Ledge, trace rock, and DNA
Rise
Rise
Unshrouded Light
I tell
The young man that I have
Fallen a million times
(Felt like it anyway)
A million falls
A million failures
A million times
An arbitrary number
Not as funny as bazillions or gazillions
Arms spread wide to denote the bigness of the thing
God sent His one and only Son
…to fall like this?
Fail like this?
Criminal nailed to a tree?
His falling and my falling, so different
His fall just
To rise to life,
Me in His arms
Jesus gives a powerful analogy for the love of God.
He said that human parents are evil but they still give their children good things. Fish instead of snakes. Bread not stones to eat. He then completes the thought–if we are so messed up but we still do right by our kids. How much more does God bless, love, and nurture?
Great, unless your parent doesn’t do those things.
What if your mother gives you a snake? What if your father gives you stones for bread? What then?
God is enough. He allows His precious children to be raised by wolves, but He sends a Lamb to save us.
Stones always remind me of Jesus. I think about the weight of small stones and imagine the size, weight, and impossibility of the stone in front of the tombs.
God gave his own most beloved son a stone. And that Son emerged alive. The Bread of Life.
Stones for bread.
Bread for stones.
Always Jesus.
Mark 5:34-36 (NIV)
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” [35] While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher any more?” [36] Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”
This makes me weep with joy and gratitude–ignoring what they said.
I follow this man like a puppy dog because he ignores what they said and raises the dead.
If you are gonna travel effortlessly on the surface of water you gotta hold tight to the rope.
By the time M was two she had a fully realized world of people she had created. They were and are vibrant characters. This past year she wrote a story peopled by punctuation marks. Also quite interesting.
I say this because she is a beautiful survivor. She was being abused by Charles when she created her first kingdom. These people we still love.
But she is haunted as well knowing that Charles continued to abuse her little sister for a long time after she asked him to stop abusing her. She assumed he would not abuse her little sister. She was seven.
I am haunted by the abuse as well. There is a wall in my life that signifies S’s solitary hurt. One night this week I wrote on it, first a memorial, then a Bible verse, then a picture of a cross. Then I got an idea. I realized that my children’s vividness overcomes evil. Jesus brings new life. So I painted a chalkboard over my grief wall.
First we wrote each other love notes. Then M drew Mr. and Mrs. Whiskers. They are English cousins of Harvey and we love their accents.
When she tells me about the Whiskers, I just hug her really tight. It is grace to see an ordinary resurrection of something as pedestrian as a wall.
Grace.
Elealee's Blog 