Papa Poet

This has been growing for years.

Crystal

Deep
they hide
beneath the earth
thousands, no millions
adorning dark catacombs
no one sees.
Is beauty unseen
still resplendent?
Is the Pope…
Does a bear…
of course it is
content to wait
millennia for one
child-like heart
to open, to see
to believe, to know
he waits for discovery.

Often I wish God’s direction for my life was as clear as it was for Jonah.  But then I’d probably do as he did.  So, how do we know.  Just pray and take a step and it usually becomes clear.

Paris Pass

Which way to Ninevah town, I ask and go
the other way, why one may ask,
did Jonah try the same stratagem,
to his dismay, spend a few days
in the belly of a whale
with time on his hands
(and other stuff too).

At least he knew where he was supposed to go
I have to wonder which I’ll regret more
in my living years, not going and wishing
I had or going and wishing I had
not, such is my thought
process as I pray a few days
for the answer I want.

Mostly I just hear myself talk.

Worship has a way of revealing confliction. This offering tries to describe mine.

Worship Interrupted

There’s always a catch,
an unexpected garrote
constricts the words,
worship interrupted before
expressed in praise or
blasphemy (for God
knows the disconnect).
Is this clutch repentance
the point of faux return,
or fear for all I am
and profess is false?
Oh my God
why have you not
forsaken me?

It is a fairly common occurrence, but again last week I saw my wife of almost 40 years… as she was 40 years ago.  I think it’s happening more often the older I get.  Perhaps it’s just nostalgia.  More likely it’s love.  (P.S., no-see-ums are a kind of biting midge.)

Cinderella’s Castle

castles ring Cruise Bay like so many centuries
standing vanguard over the vulnerable
one made of sand, bastille walls built by her
and a grand daughter digging double moats
destined to flood and fall victim in the sea surge,
life imitating life, child becoming woman
becoming child again, all things return to nature
‘til natural consequences bite us in the ass
like no-see-ums biting her raw
raising welts as faithful witnesses
to devotion denied, devotion freely given

You can get lost in Big Bend.  Miles and miles of miles and miles.  Everyone loves  the Chisos Mountains with their pine trees, cool breezes and window overlook.  But the river canyons are unique and equally impressive, rising hundreds of feet straight up from the Rio Grand or an often used runoff as in the case of Closed Canyon (one of my favorites).  I lost my prescription glasses, progressive bifocals in the muddy Rio.  They were gone as soon as they hit the water.  That was the beginning of this poem.

progressive lens

progressive
lenses slip from sight
presto-chango now you see
them now you don’t believe
you ever will
see, the river’s too murky
the current too swift
still you dive in
the icy waters
shuffle the pea
lose a confidence
game of grope
the snag infested bed
in hopes of restoration
a miraculous chance reunion
that may never be, lost
clarity

I pulled this off the cross, literally. I wrote it some years ago and it has weathered in the garage nailed to a 4 X 3 foot cross covered with webs and spider eggs. I tore off the words and moved the cross out to the shed, a little farther away. I don’t know why I don’t just destroy the cross, rip it beam from transom, and be done with it. I suppose many wonder the same thing.

his father’s cross

in a far corner,
a shadowed, forgotten, unswept
nave of the living
room, propped in position
like a structural main, stands
his father’s cross
it has occupied
the space so long
the man cannot
remember how it got there,
remember who lowered the wood
in place and time
he knows
in those interludes of life’s
extant existence where
one miters meaning-
lessness, he knows
the critical measure
in those moments
he longs to crush
the cursed cruciform,
to cast down enmity
of the haunting
iconoclast
but he leaves it
stand, vowing never to
‘mass his own
inheritance, no beam will
grace his will
for son to claim

It has been a while between posts. This poem has been struggling to survive in the neo-natal nursery most of that time. For those who have never been to a Laity Lodge retreat, you should go. If not for the speaker or the worship or the refreshment, then for the last day.

The Last Day

The last day is unique
we meet in the ober room
over head waters and scenic
hills, beyond the blue of never
after a song and prayer
we step to the edge
the breath-taking edge where
the pastor breaks bread
and proffers wine for us share.

Every time I tear,
this time I break, “Why?”
lingers the question
central in my soul where
it needles a trying ethos
to reconcile an incontinent
id with an ego-
maniacal brother to throw off
or melt the manacle.

Off hand ecumenity,
Christ followers from faith
divides all met in unity,
one table not my heritage,
yet now my bent, the break
could be release of judgment
on my soul, from my soul
a letting of blood, a filling of God,
so one may sob at atonement.

More likely mortality
the eternal rift of self
from he who is love
and lovely, to see
my disparate sin self-
wield the knife,
cut the umbilical so
from self recoil
so from man and God.

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Poem found! I just needed to look farther back in my journal. The poem is not the same as the original, but as close as I could get it. It began in a Victorian B & B in Hot Springs, Arkansas that had previously been used as preschool. Somehow the thought of sharing the same space with those who had gone before led to this poem. Perhaps it should have stayed lost. I’ll let the reader decide.

Theo-dynamics

Children learned their ABCs in this room
newly decorated as a B & B that echoes
still, laughter, cries, tattles and tales
through the narrow old growth oak
the same where some spilt milk
and some trace tale-tell signs of their passing.
We exist here together
though years divide us matter
can neither be created nor destroyed.
We breathe as one together,
an entropic gas in a closed system
evolved evenly into the volume
such that molecules I breathe are the same
as all have breathed from the beginning. The same
the Creator breathed in the beginning, the same
the Christ breathed in the end.
Such is space and time
we share the same room separated
by but a veil any student may part
to feel the flow of God.

I lost a poem. I thought it was on my laptop. It wasn’t. Memory stick? Not there either. Desktop? Nope. My last hope was my journal. Most of my poems at least start there and perhaps that beloved book still contained its essence. But no. It probably sounds silly but I grieved its loss, really. I didn’t write for several weeks hoping it would appear, walk through the door like a wayward child restored to her parents. It didn’t but this one did.

Poem Lost

I lost a poem.
It slipped into the crack of deleted things,
though caressed and created with love things
sometimes go to regions unknown.
Is there a repository,
an isle of misfit files waiting for Santa
wishing their noses wouldn’t glow?
Or is there a God
who rescues them all
and posts them on his fridge saving
scribbled papers and colored prayers far past reason
to remind Him of our efforts to praise
or holding onto evidence with which to confront,
like my Dad when I stole a bicycle lock
and hid in the bedroom hoping
he would not find out, or forgive.
But he did neither
what I deserved or expected,
instead he took me back
to the store, lock in hand, to share my humiliation.
I hope God has my poem.
I hope when he walks to the fridge
for a nightly bowl of vanilla ice cream
he pauses in passing and smiles.

I saw this guy near my old college campus. He was like every other anti-establishment guy you’ve seen peddling his bike down the road: sweaty, hairy, focused only on the road. But this time I saw something else.

Peace Sign

Peddle past old man
on your paperboy-special
with a simple grace and a peace
sign inked on the back of your pack
hair pulled tight in a frizzed gray bob
matching the frizzed gray beard on you face.
“Are you coming or going?” I ask,
“Going. And coming too, I guess.” I hear
and pretend to understand. Going and coming:
going to school, coming aware
going to bed, coming asleep
going to ‘Nam, coming to Jesus
just as I am
without one plea, no not one
but to grow my own gray bob and beard
and fade into the distance
bearing peace.