26 Thursday Nov 2020
Together we made
a band of misfit angels,
plenty just so, plenty
with wonky arm and lumpy belly
and jagged wing,
together.
Together,
we rolled butter-based dough,
floured marble pin,
hand chasing hand, little and big,
together.
Oven warmed kitchen
and laughter warmed hearts,
kinda doesn’t get better
than a band of misfit angels
together.
24 Tuesday Nov 2020
Grief stagnates
into rage.
Allow her to move;
Plant a stone,
Bury a broken song,
Sing another to a place on this earth dry
with sorrow.
Open to the endings,
without them nothing begins.
Unimaginable are the possibilities
for they
have yet to meet their own conception.
Offer the moistening river
your enormous grief.
Follow its movements,
dances are born in the currents.
Much has been taken,
now much can be given back;
Return grief to the Beauty–
tender Life may run again toward you.
Allow her to move.
Life is saying,
she needs her juice back
through the body of you.
23 Monday Nov 2020
And if God moving in us is
n o t h i n g
like we expect?
Not sublime or transcendent or ethereal,
but exactly the unrelenting pains and grief,
the dark slogging through what we hope
to shed, be done with and grow beyond?
If that confusion is the way
and all that separates us from God
is our rejection–
If then . . .
what?
18 Wednesday Nov 2020
Ever
read a book
and find yourself
stroking the page while tears drop,
uttering, “God, I love you,”
and wanting to wrap that author up in your arms
to say,
Thanks?
Today is like that.
Not sure how it is to relate with actual humans
but books,
books do walk along beside
between the breathing, the hefting, the washing
and all
the
rest.
17 Tuesday Nov 2020
Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”
Past a freedom of “I don’t know”
little HOW asks in the mystery tender
after years of silently absorbing assumptions,
a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have
already
walked the path no one had shown you and
you hadn’t yet found.
How, on this fault line shaking, cracked
and dappled light lit earth
are we to know before we know
and who–back to who before who before who–
syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams
fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame
saying we are broken
and must fight a way through
simply
to
endure?
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
What if you woke up each day pissed off.
Pissed off that you’re still here, that things are the way they are,
feeling impotent to change any of it,
that, somehow, crucial basic needs have not been accounted for
in the constellation of whoever is responsible.
What an enduring and repetitive hell.
And instead of beating yourself for–yet another–failing
you settle in
to an endless buzz of unspoken confusion
to wonder,
where could such constant pain come from?
And what, truly, is the soil to tree relationship
between rage and gratitude?
Don’t kid yourself,
those roots do tangle together
and grow in ways
so large and unarticulated you haven’t yet
begun
to trust the imagination entrusted to you
to welcome the discomfort of the discovery
Life is asking.
09 Monday Nov 2020
This is not stick feathers in your hair and prance round
the earth as if you are one. You
couldn’t not be if you tried. You
can, however, think it, feel it, behave it as if
it were so. You aren’t here
to earn it. To remember it, Yes,
and to work it through.
Mass microbes work upon you–feathers
are the cartoon version (blessed though they be).
If no brook bubbles beside you, neighbors’
televisions blare craftless tales, and your mother
is dead, Remembrance,
work though it must and will take,
is what these days reaching toward your own death
are for..
Slow into morrow, into marrow..
not only could you lose everything–
you will.
With that might your cellular awakening bring glimpse
before the end
Gold of what you are made.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 