As morning reaches where only night had been,
dew once more settles on the brittle earth
and breath returns to one,
so all can breathe again.
Category: Prayers & Liturgy
Pushing breath from blue
We push out, breath from blue,
like the breaking waves, alone with their thoughts,
and catch ourselves among the reeds.
Passing alone through districts of enchanting knowledge,
we cough up our meal of bones, still hungry to drown
inside a conundrum bigger than our shoes.
______
Our little oceans, best of our times, rimmed ‘round
with shortening days, the noose of our shrinking
humanity; allure, the currency of dreams.
Still, one swims in what one drinks and drinks
what washes down and around all that looks
for more horizon. Let the four-quartered moon
sing what is only heard when deafness prevails.
______
The tragedy of the good, the irony of evil, foisted
upon hearts ill-suited for the journey in.
So it seems that the only way to bleed to life
is in the unmooring of our punctured ships.
There is more room to bleed when splintered lie
our longings, long held, and drawn and bloodied
souls buoy once more upon
______
the silent, soothing sea.
Special thanks to dear friend and colleague, Valerie Dodge-Head for her masterful artwork which inspired this piece.
Haiku Prayers II
Caught deep in my throat
Are songs too light for singing
You sing them instead
My senses stutter
My ears unfit to listen
And yet, still, you speak
Dark clouds come sighing
But shadows run from daylight
Light too raw for words
In communion, come
To taste the bread of freedom
And brandish a cup
Like apple blossoms
Fallen from their lonely place
Are we, so planted
Sever, now, my tongue
And replace it with silence
Then, alone, I sing
Gift of paradox
Understanding brings little
Freed in conundrum
Sweet breath of Mary
Mother to all, then as now
Speak the name of God
This Holy Skin
This is a piece originally posted on my innerwoven blog on August 28th of last year. I thought I’d post it here, too. You know, for fun…
We stand and crane our necks
reaching for heaven’s bright smile,
upon shoulders of brown and moving green,
and in the act forget ourselves as one and there and good.
Made from unmade to make again,
these arms outstretched with fingers hoping
to touch the air and the unseen,
we hope for less than our skin suggests.
And yet, in this, there is no shame
since we ourselves are of the dust – rooted,
embranched and gnarled but numinous and whimsical
as the clouds and rain.
To escape from this is not as good
as other fingers poised to touch,
to show what we weren’t looking for…
ourselves, God’s fingerprints smudged
on the pane of humanity,
in the humanity of our pain-
on us.
Having sung with the choir – an evening examen
Having sung with the choir, this evening’s venture
brings light to the night and a dark covering of
powdered stillness descending, descending still
upon these battered brows. Hear, O hear
the silver notes, sliding out from cleaving tongues
pressed up against our cheeks, the very cheeks
now flushed and warm with the post-song glow of
happy hearts. O Dancing One, how lightly you move,
alight and glide where clumsy old oafs yet banished in
the wooden feet of sin are forced but to watch.
But watch we will until, our laces loose,
we cast off iron shoes, and at last
our feet fall in time with yours.
Tonight, our songs have burrowed into
heads prepared for pillows,
hearts prepared for love,
eyes prepared for sleep,
souls prepared for eternity,
and voices prepared to sing once more the songs
that wonder.
Photo found here
.
I-You-Holy Ground
I am the dusty ground, low and dry
thirsty for the imprint of holy feet.
Despoil with radiant prints, this virgin ground.
___
You are the rain, falling deftly
upon my brown soil. Now is left
your footprint on this ground.
___
I am the ashen leaves, curling and broken
awaiting but a whisper. For only then
can I fall on solid ground.
___
You are the soundless wind, howling, still.
You creep up behind me and
exhale me to the ground.
___
I am the snow, disembodied worlds of cold
and chance encounters with hand, or tongue,
eye-lash or palm needing ground.
___
You are the frozen air in which I am held
aloft, drawn slowly down
to meet with others on the frozen ground.
___
I am the waning autumn death
soon to give way to the long silence-when one Voice
becomes the loudest ground.
___
You are the Voice that speaks
heard best in dying, power given for
rising from this shivering ground.
___
I am the distant hours, the midnight passing-
the refusing minutes, trapped in hours,
running from the years of ancient ground.
___
You are the many, and the one, and all time
and nothing and everything from nothing
where time has no ground.
___
I am the weeping, the squalid groaning,
the unrequited miseries of misery’s company
laying crippled and diffused in the ground.
___
You are the end of tears and years, the question
and the answer, the sutured nerve of joy, not suggested
but present, here, on this Holy Ground.
Driving school, autumn nights and thoughts on poverty
Poverty never ceases to surprise and disarm. What is truly alarming however is whenever I grow indifferent or worse, apathetic, to its crying dishonor. May I never be unaware or distant and always prepared to enter into the suffering of others. Lord, have mercy.
I
Don’t let me be found waiting when,
like water on a mirror, I slide
from corner to corner,
unwieldy and unpredictable,
the scab before the fall,
the tears before the pain,
the gain before the loss.
Running toward is always better than
running away when haggard eyes
silently proclaim my complicity in
the hollow halls of ownership.
II
I need to simmer long in cauldrons
of grieving for ones lost on the loom,
dismembered patterns refusing collision
into any kind of shape. Can you smell
the paint on my brush, richly bristled,
bent away from their needy canvas,
dry and parched, stretched too thin
to hold more than grey or black?
Colors here only reveal what stolen
chances never offered have done to ones
who just might wear them best.
III
Plumbing these altitudes, I grow weary
from my swan dives upward,
expelling all reason for some ritual,
denying them time for tome,
confusing their ache for my art.
Fixed, stuck am I on stolen intrusions
of short memory too bent to sort,
too cold to move, too sharp to soothe.
But forward brings me closer
than any other path, not placating,
or even prosaic but parallel with promises
unveiled only through the repetition
of laughter, laughter and
the solemn, sweet, irrepressible smiles
of the poor.
nighttime songs our fears erase
a story lived, now story told
we, early young, now later, old
see stranger things than daytime held
but not without our sorrows quelled
____________________________________
we fluff and tuck and yawn and brush
pray God remove all sinning blush
the air now cool in silver glow
what dreams may come we do not know
_____________________________________
divested now of time and chance
we bid adieu and leave the dance
till thricely woven round with grace
the nighttime songs our fears erase
Learning his name
When the reprisals of our souls,
too young to love, too small for pain,
repeat their mistaken ventures into
the uncolored light of mistaken journeys,
then it is that the walls whisper
their ghostlike songs of ever after –
sighs of the imperfect.
* * *
Here there are no endings,
only endings of old beginnings
that transform by a refusal
to submit to the indentured servitude
of the hollow and broken,
preferring instead the ancient newness
of Cistine handshakes.
* * *
In the cowls of earth, her ears of stone,
hear fathomless time, tonsured and teased
from her birthplace deep in
embowelled truth whose Name Is.
Encompass within yourself this
faceless sojourner only now
learning his name.
Photo courtesy of my friends and fellow monastic-creatives at Abbey of the Arts. Thanks Christine Valters-Paintner.
Surrender – a prayer
Here, in this place awash in daylight grace,
I live my entire life on the head of a pin
on which is inscribed a single word:
surrender.
When todays are saturated in
a low, crawling, redeeming sadness:
surrender.
When the all-pervasive pall of a greening grey
removes dead soul-skin and tastes
like eating raw sewage:
surrender.
When the bitter pill of leafless desire
gets stuck in my throat and
stops up anything nutritional:
surrender.
When the wafer thin moments
of happy times bought at another’s expense
rob me of me:
surrender.
When my lover who shares
my bed, my skin, my guts, my hopes,
becomes nothing more than a side dish:
surrender.
When, in convenience, I sidestep
responsibility to another
and choose the busy road of non-involvement:
surrender.
When I’ve surrendered all I am and have,
all I’ve been and will become,
all that was, all that is and all that is not:
surrender.
When I’ve surrendered all,
I gain the one thing,
the Pearl of Great Price,
the Lily of the Valley,
the One who is in all,
who is all
and who needs no introduction because…
my soul knows him.
Rob's Lit-Bits 