Moonrise at sunset

Sun bathed trees grow fire alive

Blue turns to whale, whispers rose, purples

Fierce headlight climbs, rising patient, steady

Grey-speckled rock sighs in twilight shadow

I stand within it all unmoved, moved

As warm gives chill its last cough

New hope sets sail for open sea

Dark rows ashore

 

 

 

 

Dolmen

Three stones:

The one nearest shaped like a thumb coming from the cool mossed earth, pointing with granite joy to the chill grey sky;

The second, a wall that challenges me to be still and seek no further;

And the third soaring like a weighty bird on the wall and the thumb,

Looking wildly precarious above, yet speaking a certainty also. 

It has floated there for a long, long time.

And beneath, they say, the ancient dead yielded their bodies to the foundation’s soils

In hopes that they would journey through the threshold of the stones to the world that lies beyond. 

I hear them, on the plain’s breeze, singing of glory and life and something more,

A whisper.

It is overwhelmingly beautiful, aching, and sweet. 

I wish that they would rise with the thumb and say more, speak of what waits beyond the wall, soar with the weighted bird and carry me on their renewing breath. 

But my yearning seems to halt the wind. 

Have I hungered for too much?  Or too little. 

Their song fades in the gaping emptiness framed in stone.

I grow hollow and alone.   

More dead than the foundation souls even in their grounding silence.

I wait.  And wait.

Has the sun, dancing somewhere behind the gloomy, glowing blanket that is the sky moved an hour’s worth, or a life’s? 

I wait. 

Surely the wind will blow again; the voices will join to speak the truth I heard again.

But the open way between the stones yawns. 

The ground at my feet gathers at the tip of my nervous boot. 

There is but one thing to do. 

To pick up those feet and walk through.

Walk the threshold,

Past the thumb,

To see beyond the warning wall,

Hazard my breath beneath the precarious wild of the soaring stone bird,

And, perhaps, in the threshold’s grasp beyond my imagined safety

To hear the song anew

To swallow deep into my lungs God’s gasp

And join the earth’s whisper.

Shades of cloud
Shadows of wet
Grey and white
With hushed tones of
Silver and pink and brown
Race
Transforming
Above me
Where air must be blowing
With certainty
To the South
Of all things (I thought the rain was coming from the Southwest.).
Layers of mystery
Blessing us with mist
Uncertain rain
Still giving life to summer growth.
And the strange, newly arrived
Brown wasps huddle
In the crotches of the live oak
With glossy black wings
Wrapped like coats
Against the cool August breeze.
The quiet whispers of life and even frost
Of death and the harvest of abundance
All in a single wisp of atmospheric breath.

Two shorter poems I have been working on for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of our Lenten journey.

Rumpelstiltskin

Hard we work
To make of life's gold
A more manageable straw.
Worn and weary,
We transform the glory of our given days
Into something we can hold
Time
Value.
Oh to stop --
Just stop --
And speak only the unknown name
Of holy,
Holy,
Holy,
And rest in life's grace.

Toward the cross

Somewhere inside
Perhaps just to the left of the heart
And pressing on a lung
There is a gathering of brokenness
Like shattered glass;
Sharp
Cutting at the core
Grinding out each costly breath
And making feeling fearful.
Perhaps in the sunlight
It would reflect
Even shine
The deep red of church glass
If I can tear from my breast
Shard by shard
The pain;
A slow process at best.
And surely I will miss a crystal or two
To remind me
That breathing expends
And feeling enslaves.
Life and death depend one on the other;
They intertwine
And unite
Like lovers
Yearning for each other
Until inhale and exhale
Exalt
Into a final glory beyond.

The Visit


Perhaps once in a decade a certainty comes
Unbidden and unexpected.
The sad vagaries and the lovely mysteries pile up together,
As hours and days and years blow past,
Like garbage at the curb or stars clustered in the Pleiades.
And then it happens -- as it did this morning.  
Alone, I begin to awaken, slow and worn.   Alone.
But not, for there at the foot of the bed I feel the weight of someone,
A gracious pressure on the blankets nearby.
But not imagining anyone in my room with me
I wait with my eyes closed to be clear on just who it is.
As the morning consciousness comes, I realize there is no one there,
But still feel the presence, the ponderous certainty of someone.
So I open my eyes to see,
Even a bit afraid of who is there,
And the certainty is gone.  
Only last night’s dirty socks which I was too tired to put in the wash basket
Sit on the ground by the bed.
Seeking to be sure, I am left alone again.
No presence.  No weight.   No certainty.
Surely I could not have borne the vision of it,
So it dashed off.
Still, I was visited
In my loneliness and dreamy waking
By a message of love and certainty to lift me
For perhaps another decade or so until, forgetting,
I hear or feel or somehow know another word of truth.

Winter’s Change

My fingers sting with sharp cold.
Ah yes, this beauty comes at a cost. 
The evening’s powder snow purifies the morning landscape
And takes the last hint of life from the rose that had hung on into January.
And as the first light burns at the distant end of all I can see
The ghostly white turns to reflect the rosy warmth
Deceiving perhaps -- still just as frozen as it was before --
Or beginning just barely its slow decent into the ground.  
I walk with gentle care
For each step dents the holy surface
And mars the sweet chilled blanket.  
I have no more intent to change the snow 
Than the snow desires to burn its ice into my skin,
Yet we both do what we do not mean to do 
And change comes. 
For I cannot but gravitate down into the earth
And the new snow cannot but be snow.    
Then, without a warning, a dusting from a holly tree bowed with the weight
Breaks the silence without a sound but with a glitter dancing in the still air.  
The sun glows yellow in the transformation as snow is not snow but air
Floating with glory.
Was it a  bird that gave the snow it’s new way?   
It was too gentle a touch to have been a clumsy squirrel.  
There was no wind.
Perhaps it was an angel speaking.
There is something in this morning that warns of death 
And dances new life.
Something that hammers resurrection into dying flesh.
Something. 
Perhaps.  
So too, perhaps, I can be more than one who dwells in winter snow,
More than one whose toes, unfeeling, longing for a warm fire, sink through to the soil.
Speak to me angel.
Speak.
That I may hover in the morning sun
And glow.

"Humble beginnings"

I rise to welcome the local star

Religiously

When I am at the beach

As if it might not boil through the blue sea's horizon 

And make a new day

Without me,

Although it has done that for longer than I can envision

Just fine.

Today, the orange peeks out 

From its hiding place beneath the earth

Through a Venetian blind haze

That trims slices from the molten god

Revealing no easy round

But a shape-changer 

Driving swiftly from the wave edge

Toward some unmarked but well-worn zenith.

It writes secrets in an ancient, unknowable language

On the calm and welcoming water's face

First in the orange-red of a steep Japanese garden bridge

Lending its arch over a stone creek.

Then, imperceptibly, it bakes golden-yellow

And seems to speak anew.

Finally, white-hot characters sparkle their harsh yet vague

Message I cannot decipher 

Or even stand to look upon for long -- 

Mysteries that warm me

As I watch their sacred dance

And wait in wonder 

For a word

Standing on the cool sand

In worship.