Author: robertalanrife

I have spent the better part of my life as a professional musician. Primarily, that has meant the fun and challenging world of church music. Most recently, I have transitioned out of my role as worship and music director for Yakima Covenant Church, Yakima, Washington to global service in Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm a singer-songwriter, liturgist, poet, and writer. I love words. I love to read them. I love to write them. Most of all, I love the many intersections, like a sacramental tapestry, of life, liturgy, literature, the arts, and spiritual formation...oh, and I love haggis.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (4, Day 9)

On November 9, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Prayers & Liturgy, Theology / Spirituality, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 9 –

Lament – A Psalm About Faces

O Lord, God of faces, where now is your face?

And why have you hidden from us your gaze?

Where once we walked together,

now we thrash and reel and hack.

Darkness has become our only ally;

and hopelessness our truest friend.

For those of insolence and hatred rule over us;

the ruthless and ragged become our destroyer.

Therefore, falsehood and lies bind us;

and the absence of truth shackles us.

We have become party with wolves and savages,

those without conscience or care for the poor.

They lash out from behind empty eyes

to oppress the widow and orphan,

the immigrant and the voiceless.

All that is good, pleasing, and right is set aside;

truth and love are traded for lies and hate,

victim to the victimizers.

And through their shame have we become a byword,

a cause for mockery among the nations.

We hear them cry out in the streets,

and moan among the people of injustice against them.

But it is they who are unjust,

with lies have they clothed themselves.

How long, O Lord? How long must we watch our children caged,

and our future torn apart?

How much more treachery must we endure at their hands?

Save us, O God, from their filth;

release us from their grotesque machinations.

Turn your eyes toward us for we are weary and broken;

tearful and confused.

Find a place again among us where all that was good

can again be good; where the darkness again is dark.

Rise up, once more, gracious Lord, and be our protector;

the light behind our eyes,

the light behind our faces;

the face behind all faces.

For we are your people,

and you are our God.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (3)

On November 7, 2023November 7, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 7 –

What if?

What if we just stuck to whatever came first?

Right before us in time and space-

the faces, friends, fiends life gave us?

What if we didn’t wait to run, feel, fight, forget-

took our days and hours, minutes and decades

like a summer drink from the garden hose?

What if roses really were red, violets violently blue-

and we noticed?

What if the wax from our candles had time

to run down, scattering itself in fluid memory,

cast out on wooden tables?

What if I finished this poem

and there weren’t any more to follow?

What if that was okay?

What if what ifs weren’t so frightening?

Then, could we laugh and turn the page?

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (2)

On November 5, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

In the many conflagrations which rage around the globe, in some sense we are all complicit in the death of another, somewhere. We can never see ourselves in the oversimplification of projected sainthood, political correctness, assumed innocence, or erroneous belief that “God is on our side.” We truly are our brother’s keeper and must all weep for the other at the level ground of Christ’s cross.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Day 2-

Why do you smile at gunfire?

Why do you smile at gunfire,

when spilt blood smells like

a bullet from your own gun?

November – A Poem a Day Challenge

On November 4, 2023November 4, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I don’t write much poetry these days. Partly a lack of inspiration. Partly laziness. Partly a narrower life hallway not as friendly to poetry construction. Okay, mainly laziness. Good friend and fellow poet, Kelly Belmonte over at All Nine (please do check out her wonderful stuff!) has thrown down the gauntlet, literarily speaking. She’s has taken up the challenge to post a poem a day, or at least, a number of times throughout November.

Dearest Kelly, I take up that challenge. I do so in the simplest possible manner: Haiku. Nineteen syllables more than the ridiculously long stretch of dry, poetry-less crickets from me of late!

So, here goes.

Day 1 –

November

I saw what November press’d

against her bosom –

Spring, wrapped up tight in Winter.

“Apple Answers for Orange Questions” by Seymour Jacklin. A Review

On September 28, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

“Apple Answers for Orange Questions” by Seymour Jacklin. A Review.

Islands of the Evening – A Review

On February 20, 2023December 13, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Book Reviews, Theology / Spirituality2 Comments

What follows is my Goodreads review of this book. The amount of eclectic material that crosses my desk and ultimately finds its way to my GR ‘to-read’ pile can feel overwhelming at times, dizzying even. So much of it follows the same old patterns, character and story arcs both predictable and tired, tropes emerging like prairie calf-ruts can leave one wanting more.

In this case, my spirit just drank heaven from a garden hose. This post-evangelical, Celtic mystic sits in dust and ashes akin to a post-coital haze after mounting this treasure of a book (sorry, too much?).

Islands of the Evening: Journeys to the Edge of the World by Alistair Moffat

My rating: 5 of 5 stars (6, but I was only given the option of 5)

I read a lot of books. Fewer than some. More than others. I’ve come to expect certain things – peaks and troughs, mounting action and denouement, savages routed, heroes touted, love lost and regained, bad guys, good guys, undetermined guys; sometimes cliché, sometimes quaint, tropes and gropes and the like all tumbling together to form what eclectic fare has become my Goodreads history.

I’m no literary expert, nor do I pretend to have anything more than a reasonable grasp of specificities or requirements of genre. But I know what I like.

From time to time comes a book so beautifully crafted, so nuanced and unashamed to go to those deeper, unexplainable places of angst and ache, anger and anxiety, passion and purity. Alistair Moffat’s “Islands of the Evening” was, for me, that book. Part memoir, part travel blog, part history and hagiography, Moffat takes one on a truly remarkable journey into Scotland’s distant past. It is carved equally in stone and moss as it is blood and devotion of those “white-martyr” saints intent on braving the elements in pursuit of union with their God.

Perhaps most notable is how powerfully a man who claims no discernible faith or even belief in any God can write about the God he claims not to embrace. I leave this here where you can decide for yourself.

“Even though churches are emptying and prohibitions are being dismantled, there is an enduring consensus across Europe, in the Americas and elsewhere about decency, good behaviour, about what constitutes right and wrong. Overwhelmingly that consensus was formed by the centuries of Christianity. As doctrine and belief evolved, and as far too much blood was spilled, the Church largely formed our morality…the teachings of the Church have been enormously determinant in the operation of a generally accepted code of conduct both in private and public life.”

An atheist wrote this. So, for God’s sake (or yours, whatever), read this beautiful book.

View all my reviews

Thank you, Mr. Lawrence

On November 25, 2022 By robertalanrifeIn Sanctus, Theology / Spirituality1 Comment

I have a new spiritual director. Her name is Lynn. She is a most perceptive lady, especially given how much I adore poetry. After our most recent spiritual direction session, she was compelled to send me this by way of follow up. Two things: find yourself an anam cara; a professional spiritual director or at least someone you trust to walk with you as you both walk with God. Secondly, look for the sacred in narrative and poetry. Next to creation and sacred writ, it is often the most meaningful manner by which the God of creation speaks to our souls.

So then, Lynn, thanks for listening so attentively.

Thank you, Mr. Lawrence for this poem which has always been a favourite.

Lord, thank you for both!

Where poets learn to see

On October 2, 2022 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic1 Comment

Grey ash, dead-branch-dim

into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –

apathy.

Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,

hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere

to land, to inhale.

Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,

wrestling out colours, lines, faces –

not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.

Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.

These

lazy

letters, unfinished sen

Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,

we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,

the oppressive weight of art.

As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,

in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.

Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.

Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live

the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?

That prodigious, crowing dark –

where poets learn to see.

The scars of our days

On September 18, 2022 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic1 Comment

We stumble on flat ground when shouldering the false hopes of doctrine,

grave clothes of religion – its diminishments. Falling headlong

on easy roads we can’t enjoy for our straining to explain.

We scratch at stones, wet from dawn-drenched, day-breath,

looking for what signs of life emerge.

But, it hides itself away in the damp unseen,

crevices unnoticed by all that never knows light.

Beauty grows savage, flowers pushing up through concrete,

stem intact, root-sutured rock.

Water still moves under winter’s deep-crusted yawn.

Finches fly back north to signal summer’s return.

There is a beauty too perfect for vain curiosities,

hope, hunted for, but stuck in the idolatry of certainty.

We are as we are grown, have groaned –

greater in the scars of our days.

On aging

On July 10, 2022July 12, 2022 By robertalanrifeIn Creative Process, Waxing Poetic3 Comments

The writer must create from one, or both, of two places: intention, the rhythmic pounding of chain gang-style word production, regardless of circumstance or existential readiness and/or secondly, inspiration, generally obtained through the navigations of a life-lived and sopping up the genius of creators much greater than oneself. The clear lack of words posted to this site in recent months is evidence that I fail miserably in the former. This one, however, comes from having read some of the collected poems in the posthumous collection: “100 Poems” of Seamus Heaney.

The best writers write much using little. They say fundamental things with brevity, economy, exactitude, and a settled, but discerned, relationship with their environment. Seamus Heaney is such a one.

This is brief, but I hope, settled in its own way. I pray it pokes at something in you that, like for me, has lain dormant. Maybe, together, we can reawaken to all the beauty still out there, waiting to be discovered and toyed with.