November – A Poem a Day Challenge (day 27)

On November 27, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

A Poem a Day

The wordsmith’s challenge: to produce a fully grown garden

in less than 24 hours. Plow down deep, furrough’d in sweat

and the searing summer sun baking whatever it touches.

Cast out fistfulls of seed into the shifting wind and coarse ground

where time and chance and powers above and below

cast out their wills or ills upon your tiresome toil.

–

An ankle turned, the back of the neck red, raw, pealing.

Old machines not meant for new work

retain their eccentricities despite your mechanical interloping.

Tender, anxious words spoken upon docile dirt,

your antediluvian blessing

meant to caress or careen a spark to light a fire all

too easily snuffed.

You trade your peace for her pregnancy.

–

Let loose your prayers for weather and time and the

vagaries of hope, if only to see once more

the perfection in a tiny handful of wheat.

–

Now, do it again tomorrow.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 13)

On November 13, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 13 –

The angular sky

The angular sky is quick

to remind us of

her lazy but subtle whim.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (6, Day 11)

On November 11, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 11 –

My simple, but genuine, thank you to our life in Edinburgh…

A protrusion of gratitude

Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations

of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.

That literature of land partnered with time

makes for fragrant mornings in settings

of coal-kissed stone, unsullied

by lesser things.

No more exile here –

just a protrusion of gratitude.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 10)

On November 10, 2023 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

One more

One more day to figure it out.

One more day to turn over the wrong tables

for the right reasons;

correct the wrongs spray-painted on crumbling walls,

the signposts of injustice.

One more day to find the right god,

tattooed on the arms wrapped around our latent lusts.

One more day to cry the tears meant for another,

for ourselves, for our children’s children, still gasping for

breath under the rubble of a thousand bad decisions.

One more attempt to set the bones,

broken, dislocated from too much heavy lifting

of things not our own.

One more song to sing, croaked out

to friend and foe, neighbour and fiend,

with words yet to come.

One more choice, to free, to find, to follow, to forget

what else might surely come.

One more day for one more day,

for one more.

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?

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.