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.

Satisfaction guaranteed

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Marvel at the cost of such pedantry,

succumb to the vagaries of baubledom, hoofery, and chicane glaminosity.

The suit fits well, the shoes reveal the glib and jabber of your craft.

In your pocket you finger loose change,

rubbed together like shuffle and jump bumper cars.

See the shine he says.

Looks good on you, he says.

One last gander, he says, take it for a spin.

You check out the merchandise while he checks out yours

and, together, you strike the deal to deal the strike.

Inside it smells like an Alberta forest with a hint of cheap cologne.

Something doesn’t feel right, he switches feet too often,

hasn’t looked you in the eye, yet,

and talks faster than you can type.

But something about this impish clown ghetto pulls one hand to sign,

the other to wipe the sweat from your anxious brow.

This parade of top-down, convertible politics

sits in your gut like so much bad stew.

Need and want swap places and you sigh…

But in the end, your satisfaction is guaranteed.

After all, the payments won’t kill you,

but the possessions might.

 

Kill ’em all

On By robertalanrifeIn Parables, Waxing Poetic7 Comments

An obvious risk to such provocative pieces is their potentially divisive, incendiary nature. I post because I am compelled to write what I feel. But I do so in full recognition that what I feel stands in contradiction to what many others feel. Hence, with conviction but also humility, I post…

Yes please, describe for us your toxic, platinum dreams

you grumpy old men, front lawn savages and blue-haired fussbudgets

whose projected fears force our embroilments.

Like a bikini at a funeral you bluster and fidget

and point fingers with one syllable jeers, taunting of yesterday’s better standing.

Only then will we learn that the beach of our desires

doesn’t meet your death loving, tea ‘n sympathy standards.

You clink glasses with friends at darts, or grab ass in the elevator,

but turn a blind eye to a man on trial

because his head covering took away your comfort.

Wrap yourself in the flag for protection

from those sandy, bearded bastards who kill your friends killing them.

Then, with hand on heart, the right politics,

a cigarette tucked behind your ear, and misty-eyed blindness,

you look for ways not to look for ways.

Let’s help our kids by killing theirs.

Let’s build our future by robbing theirs.

Let’s pad our budgets while emptying theirs.

Let’s speak for us by silencing them.

We don’t need to love,

just kill ’em all.

That’s what Jesus would do.

night

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

Winking past benighted minions

still and soft, she glides away.

Severed light pushed off her pinions,

for she had nothing left to say.

***

Dark her bosom, darker forming,

full of starry, whiteling lights;

perched atop the scalp of morning,

waits for courage to ignite.

***

Now to find the peace so wanting,

till we are awake again,

sleep bejewels our hearts unflaunting,

send us now thy rest, our friend.

Triangle Poems VI

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Gubernatorial

Just as we were making way

the circus came to town.

We began to hope,

but had to stand

in a booth;

and truth

fled.

***

Penmanship

The scratch of ink on paper

still thrills a writer’s heart.

Her quill skips and weaves,

darting hither,

following

her heart’s

end.

***

Cheese

Good, like sunny afternoons,

and flowers in a field,

aged milk matures

to bring a taste

of heaven,

ripe and

old.

***

Checkers

Red and black go dancing past,

old friends still sitting there

well past dinner time.

“King me” he says.

“That’s not fair!

You won

last.”

***

Stilettos

Calves as tight as trampolines,

she totters high above

we humble mortals.

Forcing a smile,

she winces

and looks

down.

Morning run

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic3 Comments

Flagrantly I fall into mists of morning’s madness.

What is it I so crave about this pain?

Droplets of dew vie with damp, glowing forehead

and share a breath of dawning air.

Footfalls fast, no frequent, and plodding,

struggle to overcome this sluggish lump of futile flesh.

Dear God, help me to see the horizon,

because there is my end.

My beginning.

When a song knows you

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Music and the arts, Words...always words3 Comments

On that rare occasion when comes a song that catches in your throat and your moistened eyes lift; your heart swells and your tongue cleaves in silence to the roof of your dry, gaping mouth, one can only listen…

Music has wafted its way through the corridors of this boy’s life without either asking permission or signing a release form. At any given moment a particular song or sonata or ambient guitar piece has bored a hole into the otherwise forbidden regions of my soul where God doesn’t even like to go. And it stays. It stays and plays, disturbing the water leaving manuscripted ripples of memories repressed or forgotten, faces attached to long lost friends, pieces of time squandered and scattered on the floor.

I don’t mean to sound sullen for music has also drawn, even driven me, by the Spirit into all manner of delightful wilderness as well. It leaves its mark gently, but insistently, borrowing from what it knows will always push my heart into the deep end where my affections direct my thoughts and together, meet my will.

And I am changed.

It does seem a little more than mere serendipity when just the right lyric encased in the perfect package of notes, irrepressibly good and right, finds its way to my hungry ears. There is that moment of instant recognition. Someone knows this, has felt this before me and I am not alone. At these times a kinship is unveiled. Someone is already walking with me along pathways I had thought previously untraveled, and soothes me in the knowledge that they’re only unknown to me. Others have traversed these waters, even successfully, and been found by God, waiting on the other side; the same God you may have inwardly chided for his conspicuous absence, barely perceivable as you stumbled and groped along.

I remember the first time I ever heard Bridge Over Troubled Water. It occurred to me how duped I had been into believing I had already heard the best song ever, which at the time might have been the Thomas, the Tank Engine theme song. I was seven years old and nothing would ever be the same. I begged my parents to purchase the album (now extinct flat, black disc-like things with countless grooves magically holding music).

The next similarly visceral encounter was my discovery of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by…well, I had no idea then. Cliché as it might be among the classical music elite, no one can deny, in good conscience, the genius and mystical profundity of the piece. To this day it shatters me every time I hear it.

I was captured again when, on a drive from Calgary to Cranbrook, B.C., I encountered Bach’s Wedding Cantata and the opening Kyrie of Schubert’s Mass in Ab for the first time. To say I was captivated would be an understatement of hyperbolic proportions. I had to pull the car over, so spellbound was I at the unforgivably beautiful refrains. My love affair with this music continues unabated.

You may think it trite by comparison but, lately, my descent into a blubbering, snotty mess has been evoked by a simple little song, We Were Better Off, by Elenowen, a barely known duo. It has taken its place among those selections added to Rob’s warning,-this-one-guarantees-tears-so-avoid-public-places playlist. Go ahead, listen and tell me what you think. I dare you to do so without at least a hint of connection. If you feel nothing at all, you’re either at the pre-coffee stage of your day, a grumpy pragmatist, or a zombie (no pressure).

Music, like the people with whom we share it, comes at the most unexpected times. And, when it does, my self-imposed melancholy is banished if only for a moment as the notes probe places left unexplored and I am placed under God’s laser-specific microscope. Now that’s theology. If I were to say at those times that I now knew this song, it is then God reminds me that, in fact, it is the song that knows me.

Da signe al fine.

Sonnet from an airport lounge

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

This is not autobiographical. I repeat, this is not…oh never mind, you decide. As a recovering alcoholic with almost 10 years sober (no, stop, please…enough), this is an all too familiar scene. Trying to wash away fear, doubt and pain while dulling the insistent voice of comfort offered us by God and stranger. Hurting together is still better than drinking alone, n’est pas?

Sitting in the airport lounge with spirit bayoneted,

half-hearted conversations, words, more words, tumble out, un-netted.

Ne’er-do-wells sing trashy songs, their voices loud, un-vetted,

scare away all vestiges of peace,  un-still…

* * * * *

Seeking solace, groping hope from speaker’d plane route changes,

arrivals swapped as airplanes, circling round, my vision ranges.

Slow, so slow and slower still the time, these hours, outrageous

offer little respite from these voices, shrill.

* * * * *

But in the lateness of this hour, e’en now there comes a voice,

some gentle, waltzing words of comfort land, offering a choice

to listen hard, to find, to seek and fin’lly heed this noise,

since Whiskey Sours failed their task, this heart to fill.

* * * * *

So much to lose, through burden’d care;

so much to gain when life we share.

Still time for Fall

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic5 Comments

The days and nights they tumble on,

one day’s toes on tomorrow’s heels.

She grunts and forces her way upon

those who see time as cogs and wheels.

***

The endless hours push and shove

and jostle in hooded robe and shoes,

that heedless plod till more’s not enough

to hinder pathways trapped in ooze.

***

To catch the minutes wand’ring past,

their wings so sprightly fluttering by

’tis hopeless hope this die we cast

to tame this time, though hard we try.

***

Then stillness in this world should we

be after, solitude, tranquility.

God won’t rush, transforming, He,

our hearts from panic to civility.

***

So, let these moments taken now

to pause, reflect, encounter all

be God’s release of furrowed brow,

and stop…to smell the Fall.

Thanks to Lois Keffer for the awesome photo from her own Photoshop collection.

Still, in One Peace

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic2 Comments

Still, in One Peace

Fitting is it not that matters mounting,

with mystifying weight, find smaller place

and quieter voice beside waters of one’s heart, stilled?

***

Edges blunt as catalysts osmose, and color replaces frightened

monochromatic moods, all oozing

together in the panacea of grace.

***

I catch my breath long enough to taste air,

long forgotten and let the taste of quiet

fill my longing lungs with life, raw and real.

***

Here, there are no answers,

only better questions; hints of high above

where life grows smaller but clear, unified.

***

Lastly, I stretch legs, weary from

longer strides than meant for.

Here I am, still, in one peace.

 

Look now, the hidden road

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words5 Comments

 

Look now, the hidden road denies these footsteps

their certainty, unsure though they wend,

through what little solid soil succumbs

to plodding, silent shoe-footfall.

Forward slowly, halting back apace,

how often my wayward way, the Way, ‘tis not.

These choking vines abort momentum,

spilling out on soft and silent stones

their devious designs along this rutted path.

A fog, a mist, a nightling now,

I deign to trust what lying eyes will tell,

list’ning instead for the rustling wind

some branch to bow and bend and brush my face

and share with me geography.

Unsteady though the way must be

my hands atremble reach for other hands

for, only then, does lostness find its way.