Glance, and I will escape you.
Look, and I will show you.
Behold, and I will move you.
Observe, and I will educate you.
See, and I will change you.
Changed, you will see me.
Category: Life of Rob
A Tuesday Examen
Scattered across lonely seas
dwell the lilies of desire.
Dotted between the balancing
green are other frondish delights
with fingers extended on palms
upraised, deterred by nothing
but the gentle floating away of
newly made ripples, starting
from a center and pushing out
to the edges where the shoreline
awaits to receive what waves may come.
They have made big what once
was small, white-capped wonder
from still and never-sunken petals.
The end exhumes the beginning
but little beginnings brought
such proud endings, humbled
by endless sandy sleep. Here
God is waiting.
God is watching.
God is cooking fish.
Lily: www.parentdish.com
Crashing waves: www.123rf.com
A Monday Examen
There is no way to distinguish
the place where the radiance of evening
touches the face of God.
Just fingers of grace-soaked light
long, drawling and sure,
that pull at the last, dark places
and weed them out of the heated ground
to die quietly in the burning
breath of love, and then
to live again.
A Sunday Examen
God’s tears like sweet nectar fall
in swollen rivulets down the back of my life.
The words of the day jumbled in
tumbling silence portray what little
is left to say from one with too much to say.
So I do what should be done
at the brink of evening. I draw the shutters
on a well-muscled mouth housing
too many pointless words and
listen.
Image from www.flickr.com
A Saturday Examen
Let the baptismal waters drown this insubstantial
love and choke the complexities of my lostness.
Cleanse my spiritual palette and don
the insignificance of wayward wants
upon your crested waking.
Splash your drops of salvation, dampened perfection,
on this tired brow, furrowed from wrongdoing
and convince a soul, drawn in ink
of the erasable foes of night.
A Friday Examen
Sometimes, on the way into darkness
I stub my toe on the eyelash of God.
Sometimes, forgotten in never-spoken dreams
I hear the hushed and tender tones of
Heaven breathing the un-gated lyrics of eternity.
Sometimes, I even stop to listen.
A Thursday Examen
Here, the light blows past my eyes
like breezes of sapphired memories
imploding into smallest beauties, personified.
* * *
Here, I escape Neptune’s icy breath
and settle in pillowed wonder
to gaze into the eyes of God.
* * *
Here, the small becomes greater
than the expanse of all
that seeks greatness above all.
* * *
Here, the silence sounds as one
the bells of never-ending music,
symphonic scenes of peaceful song.
* * *
Here, Heaven’s whispers are louder
than the screams of hell.
Among many voices, I hear but one.
* * *
Here, there live the deepest things,
their freshness, drained of dark and ill
point my seeking face toward Another.
* * *
Here, I’ve learned to stay and sing,
to sing the Day of days
when night, abandoned, disappears.
Daydreams – poetry from the periphery IV
Has been
He was on the football team,
his jersey long retired.
He still parties there
with high school kids
half his age;
time has
run.
Emoticon
A person in a circle,
soul in a smiley face.
What tale does it tell?
Evidences
of something
beyond
it.
Cancer
Every time I look away
I see his sunken eyes.
Pallid reminders
of death’s loud voice
and broken
promise:
more.
Pulchritude
When we see in pulchritude,
those things that seldom shine;
only then we see
what goodnesses
fill the earth-
and we
sing.
Falling in a window
Life is God’s distillation
of Light from dark and light.
When the morning comes
to breathe her life
into me,
I can
fall.
Pictures: www.scotconway.com & www.123rf.com, respectively
Evening examen-ate
Rooting down inside the soil of today’s plantings,
what is there to find of nourishing value
to those forced to hunt for food?
Will my table be full of happy gleanings,
the imperishable crumbs of imperfect bread
dipped in the eternal whimsy of Photo: www.trappist.net
God’s good thoughts?
Will those left knocking outside
the door of my own inner garden
remain in hungered silence?
Or, will the gardener open up
the squeaky gate that leads to nowhere
and feed paupers on a king’s repast?
If only that can be found,
then this has been a good day.
Further thoughts from the kitchen window
* * *
Still not moving a muscle,
her musings take a different turn.
Her thens and nows merge
into what thens? what ifs? whys?
She digs into chambers of stillness
yet untainted by too many wrong questions
and finds enough echo of
the questions once most prevalent:
why not? How?
* * *
Timelines soon give way
to time’s lines wending their way
through the groves of memory,
the pastures of her being
where placid, daytime scenes
of yesterday’s yearnings
force their way upward
and sit on the floor of her conscious heart.
* * *
Is the ideal and the real
a good place to struggle?
“How long?” she thinks, must this
place elude where
boundaries crave margins,
periods demand commas
on statements crying out to be questions?
“Isn’t this story old enough?
When do I get to narrate what
seems so uncontrollable, characters
unrecognizable, a plot unyielding?
* * *
“Birds don’t sing because
they have an answer,
but because they have a song” they say.
Who is “they” and what do
“they” say when the “song”,
already oversung, becomes a mockery
in its lack of answers?
Sometimes the ready breath
of silence with neither song nor answer
brings more life than
a song that is merely a
kitchen without windows.
Painting: At the Kitchen Window by American painter De Scott Evans (1847-1898)
