by Dana Gioia

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

“But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”

-Stephen King

by Maxine Kumin

Whatever happened to the cross-chest carry,
the head carry, the hair carry,

the tired-swimmer-put-your-hands-on-my-shoulders-
and-look-in-my-eyes retrieval, and what

became of the stride jump when you leap
from impossible heights and land with your head

above water so that you never lose sight
of your drowning person, or if he is close enough, where

is the lifesaver ring attached to a rope
you can hurl at your quarry, then haul

him to safety, or as a last resort
where is the dock onto which you tug

the unconscious soul, place him facedown,
clear his mouth, straddle his legs and press

with your hands on both sides of his rib cage
to the rhythm of out goes the bad air in

comes the good and pray he will breathe,
hallowed methods we practiced over and over

the summer I turned eighteen to win
my Water Safety Instructor's badge

and where is the boy from Ephrata, PA
I made out with night after night in the lee

of the rotting boathouse at a small dank camp
on the lower Chesapeake Bay?

http://youtu.be/wSJoZiB-UGY

http://youtu.be/kDA9NbPAK8o

by Leonard Cohen

How sweet time feels
when it’s too late

and you don’t have to follow
her swinging hips

all the way into
your dying imagination

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

"The Trapeze Swinger"

Please remember me, happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin, the time when
We counted every black car passing

Your house beneath the hill and up until
Someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range, a piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention

But please remember me, fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates
Had some eloquent graffiti

Like 'We'll meet again' and 'Fuck the man'
And 'Tell my mother not to worry'
And angels with their great handshakes
But always done in such a hurry

And please remember me, at Halloween
Making fools of all the neighbors
Our faces painted white, by midnight
We'd forgotten one another

And when the morning came I was ashamed
Only now it seems so silly
That season left the world and then returned
And now you're lit up by the city

So please remember me, mistakenly
In the window of the tallest tower
Call, then pass us by but much too high
To see the empty road at happy hour

Gleam and resonate just like the gates
Around the Holy Kingdom
With words like, 'Lost and found' and 'Don't look down'
And 'Someone save temptation'

And please remember me as in the dream
We had as rug burned babies
Among the fallen trees and fast asleep
Beside the lions and the ladies

That called you what you like and even might
Give a gift for your behavior
A fleeting chance to see a trapeze
Swinger high as any savior

But please remember me, my misery
And how it lost me all I wanted
Those dogs that love the rain and chasing trains
The colored birds above there running

In circles round the well and where it spells
On the wall behind St. Peter
So bright on cinder gray in spray paint
'Who the hell can see forever?'

And please remember me, seldomly
In the car behind the carnival
My hand between your knees, you turn from me
And said the trapeze act was wonderful

But never meant to last, the clowns that passed
Saw me just come up with anger
When it filled with circus dogs, the parking lot
Had an element of danger

So please remember me, finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear, but if I make the Pearly Gates
I'll do my best to make a drawing

Of God and Lucifer, a boy and girl
An angel kissin' on a sinner
A monkey and a man, a marching band
All around the frightened trapeze swinger

by Ted Kooser

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

by Mary Oliver

I don't know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can't really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that's their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don't know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn't persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don't. That's your business.
But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be
if it isn't a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

We have all seen them - pictures of a tall, handsome, peaceful and serene Jesus. I have grown to hate those images.

I am 6' 1" and 200 lbs. I picture Jesus shorter than me - a guy I could probably "take" in a knock down-drag out if that's what it came to . . . .

I picture a battered Jesus. A short guy at the bar with a black eye swollen shut, a fat, split lip and a smile that let's everyone know he is as tough as they come.

I don't want a drycleaned Jesus.

I want a Jesus who smells like a locker room and when he catches me staring at him, slides his bar stool out, spreads his arms wide, smiles and says, "You want a piece of me?"

I want a Jesus who goads me into a fight and let's me get a few good punches in before he overwhelms me and erases all thoughts but the searing pain I have inflicted upon myself - a Jesus who puts me flat on my back, pins my arms and thumps my chest over and over all while laughing and asking, "Who's your savior?"

"You are!"

"Who died for your sins?"

"You did!"

"Who's your daddy?"

"Same as yours!"

"Who's gonna buy me my next beer?"

"I will!"

And slowly he let's me up. I mutter "Dick" under my breath and he replies "Asshole".

Then I sit side by side with him, order us another round, and just before we sip, he places his arm around me and says, "You gonna say grace? Or do you want another piece of me . . . sweetheart?"

Naturally I reply, "You got lucky last time"

And the bar stools scrape as we square off against one another once again . . .

"No need to keep them cold" he chuckles to the bartender - "This won't take long . . ."

"Go to hell", I say.

"I have," he laughs.

He cracks his swollen knuckles, looks me in the eye and says, "I came BACK"

And away we go.

Next round is no doubt on me.

". . . a time to mourn . . ."
- Ecclesiastes 3:4

This is not Easter.

This is the in-between.

This is the tomb of our souls.

Anything but this.

I prefer the cross to this - at least there is breath and sensation - but this . . . nothingness . . . .

This darkness . . . .

This death . . . .

You had God and Jesus and the whole thing "figured out" . . . you were wrong . . . if not wrong about everything, wrong enough to make you question everything . . .

This is when God doesn't make sense - when the pain is too deep, the betrayal mind-bendingly hard to fathom . . . Abandon all hope - you had it all wrong . . .

So lay it all down, your desire to control God and others . . . lay it down . . .

Your pride in your own wisdom which has become foolishness . . . lay it down . . .

Your arrogant words spoken with such conviction have returned to you as ashes in your mouth . . . spit them out and lay them down . . .

Everything you thought you knew about God and life, others and yourself . . . your dogmatic judgments you have been clinging to in your blasphemous pride . . . lay them all down . . .

Will. You. Now. Cling to Jesus? . . . .

The cold lifeless body of a failed fairy-tale revolution?

Its all well and good to clap your hand to your mouth in horror on Good Friday . . . but will you now follow him to the grave? To your own death and destruction? The death of everything you hold dear? . . .

Will you willingly walk into the tomb as the stone scrapes closed and know only Christ, and Him crucified?

Will you now - after all that happened yesterday . . . admit you were wrong? . . .

Will you finally . . . for one God-damned day . . . humble yourself? . . .

This is not Easter . . . .

Lay it all down and step into the abyss . . .

This is the tomb of our souls.

There is no way out . . .

Unless the way out is through.

Seee also: http://thedawgrun.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-long-march.html

"Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally."

- Oscar Wilde

"Be cautious of those who confuse kindness with weakness."

- Noah ben Shea

"A man who is intimate with God will never be intimidated by men."

- Leonard Ravenhill

"I ought to pray before seeing any one . . . Christ arose before day and went into a solitary place. David says: ‘Early will I seek thee' . . . feel it is far better to begin with God - to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another."

- Robert Murray M'Cheyne

Legalism doesn't make people "better"; it makes them worse. Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality. We make a terrible mistake when we believe that the answer to poor performance, be it moral, spiritual, or relational, is more Law. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the Law.

- Tullian Tchividjian: Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

A dear friend asked me a question recently:

You know...too much of the time I feel that I am so wrapped up with my own needs and worries that I don't have the capacity to love and pray for others to the extent I would like. Do you know of ways to remedy this?

My Response:

My most desperate prayer is a groan.

When God grants me the strength, I pray, "Jesus help me"

After a week or so of that I come to "Thank you for the blessings of my difficulties"

Then "Help me to see beauty"

Then "Flow through me to others"

And that's usually when I begin to love others enough to pray for them.

I am not sure I believe this but I sort of do: You cannot pray out of your own strength - The ability to pray is a grace given by God. if you can't muster a prayer its because God is not allowing it - Ask why he is allowing you to feel desolate and alone - he is showing you something or teaching you something or removing something from you. When we can't pray, its because God is breaking us - the question is, "to what purpose?"

Two common explanations for the inability to pray for others are:

1) You have sin in your life that is blocking that
2) You simply don't love others enough

I find both of those pretty thin gruel.

I think a better explanation is similar to why you shouldn't swim after eating - you blood is rushing inward to your digestive system where it is needed - there isn't enough in your extremities to avoid cramping.

When we can't pray for others its because we are in a pseudo-state of survival spiritually speaking. That energy is needed to be turned inwards at the moment. God needs you to digest something and make it a part of you before you go out "swimming" with others.

So groan. Beg for help in the simplest of prayers. Thank God for the furnace of adversity. Ask God to help you see goodness. Submit yourself to his purposes. Then pray like the spiritual powerhouse you were created to be.

But then again, what do I know?

by Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

by Sue Ellen Thompson

My daughter hauls her sacks of beans
and vegetables in from the car and begins to chop.
My father, who has had enough caffeine,
makes himself a manhattan-on-the-rocks.

It's Sunday, his night for sausage and eggs,
hers for stir-fried lentils, rice, and kale.
Watching her cook eases his fatigue
and loneliness. Later, she'll trim his toenails.

He no longer has an appetite
for anything beyond this evening ritual.
But he'll fry himself an egg tonight
and eat dinner with his granddaughter. For a widower,

there is no greater comfort in the world
than his girls and his girls' girls.

The required cheerfulness that characterizes many of our churches produces a suffocating environment of pat, religious answers to the painful, complex questions that riddle the lives of hurting people.

- Tullian Tchividjian: Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free

by Ogden Nash

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

by Wendell Berry

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

by Wendell Berry

"Do you want to ask
the blessing?"

"No. If you do,
go ahead."

He went ahead:
his prayer dressed up

in Sunday clothes
rose a few feet

and dropped with a soft
thump.

If a lonely soul
did ever cry out

in company its true
outcry to God,

it would be as though
at a sedate party
a man suddenly
removed his clothes

and took his wife
passionately into his arms.

by Wendell Berry

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don't think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds or, satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
over this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
it forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.

Lent is upon us.

The long march to death and destruction.

Not resurrection - not yet.

This is a march to Gethsemane, to sweating blood and crying tears.

A march to the lash - to a crown of thorns.

A march into a crowd that defines you by who they themselves are.

This is the long march into a crowd you want to love and help that waves palm branches on Sunday and cries "Give us Barabbas!" on Friday.

This is the march to the cross and God himself forsaking you.

When all goes black as the grave and all hope is lost.

Make no mistake - lent is a march into oblivion.

If you haven't read "Hinds Feet on High Places" by Hannah Hurnard, you might consider it.

This song from Rent of all things comes to mind:


http://youtu.be/IYhPO9-oLQk

Years ago I had a vision of a man trying to walk through the narrow door to heaven - only he had all this luggage (baggage). Suitcases in each hand and under each arm . . . and he couldn't get through the door unless he dropped the baggage.

He had to let go of his fears, his doubts, his grudges, his judgements - he had to lay it all down.

But once he dropped his baggage, the doorway narrowed - and he couldn't squeeze through in his suit and tie - off came the watch, the shoes, the coat and tie, the shirt, the pants . . . all of it . . . the posturing, posing, the manipulating and politicking . . . the only way through the doorway was to be utterly naked - vulnerable - without pretense or agenda.

And the door lead to the grave.

Its into utter darkness and forsaken-ness that we must go. We must lay ourselves down on the cold stone slab of our own ending - place our being into the hands of God and beg for our own destruction if that's what pleases Him.

And God will turn his back. Make no mistake about that. He will leave you there - cold and alone and consumed by your own doubts until the flame of your fear eats up all the oxygen in the tomb and withers and dies in on itself.

And then death will come.

And surrender.

And peace . . . finally . . .

And there we will lay - cold - alone - and yet . . . at peace - having discarded all our dogma - leaving no room for anything but the Christ who is laying cold and lifeless next to us.

Close your eyes . . . let it go . . . your unending has come . . .



what's that noise?

Just finished one of my morning readings - Oswald Chambers, October 12. Yeah so I am a little behind or a lot ahead - don't dwell on it - it doesn't matter.

This is one of those things that I read and am not sure it is true - but I WANT it to be true. It just seems impossible to me at the moment though.

The test of a man’s religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not before the footlights (cf. John 1:36). It is a painful business to get through into the stride of God, it means getting your second wind spiritually. In learning to walk with God there is always the difficulty of getting into His stride; but when we have got into it, the only characteristic that manifests itself is the life of God. The individual man is lost sight of in his personal union with God, and the stride and the power of God alone are manifested.

It is difficult to get into stride with God, because when we start walking with Him we find He has outstripped us before we have taken three steps. He has different ways of doing things, and we have to be trained and disciplined into His ways. It was said of Jesus – "He shall not fail nor be discouraged," because He never worked from His own individual standpoint but always from the standpoint of His Father, and we have to learn to do the same. Spiritual truth is learned by atmosphere, not by intellectual reasoning. God’s Spirit alters the atmosphere of our way of looking at things, and things begin to be possible which never were possible before. Getting into the stride of God means nothing less than union with Himself. It takes a long time to get there, but keep at it. Don’t give in because the pain is bad just now, get on with it, and before long you will find you have a new vision and a new purpose.

And if I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey:

And

http://youtu.be/LHacDYj8KZM

by Jack Gilbert

There is a time after what comes after
being young, and a time after that, he thinks
happily as he walks through the winter woods,
hearing in the silence a woodpecker far off.
Remembering his Chinese friend
whose brother gave her a jade ring from
the Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.
Two weeks later, when she was hurrying up
the steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,
and the thousand-year-old ring shattered
on the concrete. -when she told him, stunned
and tears running down her face, he said,
"Don't cry. I'll get you something better."

by Jack Gilbert

The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies
are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over
high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound
of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains
and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless,
the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left
in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible,
the architecture of the soul begins to show through.
God has put off his panoply and is at home with us.
We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.
We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now.
We make love without rushing and find ourselves
afterward with someone we know well. Time to be
what we are getting ready to be next. This loving,
this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down
roots and comes back again year after year.

by Jack Gilbert

The soft wind comes sweet in the night
on the mountain. Invisible except for
the sound it makes in the big poplars outside
and the feel on his naked, single body,
which breathes quietly a little before dawn,
eyes open and in love with the table
and chair in the transparent dark and stars
in the other window. Soon it will be time
for the first tea and cool pear and then
the miles down and miles up the mountain.
"Old and alone," he thinks, smiling.
Full of what abundance has done to his spirit.
Feeling around inside to see if his heart
is still, thank God, ambitious. The way
old men look in their eyes each morning.
Knowing she isn't there and how much Michiko
isn't anywhere. The eyes close as he remembers
seeing the big owl on the roof last night
for the first time after hearing it for months.
Thinking how much he has grown unsuited
for love the size it is for him. "But maybe
not," he says. And the eyes open as he
grins at the heart's stubborn pretending.

http://youtu.be/u-5DXLgGyFM

by David Shumate

If it weren't for the photographs, you might think Aeschylus or
Euripides had made him up. Or that he was one of those biblical
fellows tormented to the brink of what a soul can bear. But there
he stands. Long black coat. Tall hat. Half a beard. Droopy eyes. Ears
large enough to serve several men. Like the offspring of a midwife
and a coroner. A tree impersonating a man. Alongside him, his
generals seem daunted. Anxious for the day they too will grow
into men. Then there's that odd mix of joy and sorrow etched
across his face. As when a joke hits a little too close to home. Given
all that's gone on—Gettysburg, Antietam, both Bull Runs, four
long years of war, more than half a million dead, a wife moaning
on the balconies, a child in the grave—Given all that ... why hasn't
his hair turned pure white?

"If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."

- Timothy Keller - The Prodigal God

by George Bilgere

My father would lift me
to the ceiling in his big hands
and ask, How's the weather up there?
And it was good, the weather
of being in his hands, his breath
of scotch and cigarettes, his face
smiling from the world below.
O daddy, was the lullaby I sang
back down to him as he stood on earth,
my great, white-shirted father, home
from work, his gold wristwatch
and wedding band gleaming
as he held me above him
for as long as he could,
before his strength failed
down there in the world I find myself
standing in tonight, my little boy
looking down from his flight
below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,
his eyes wide and already staring
into the distance beyond the man
asking him again and again,
How's the weather up there?

"Our level of joy (and therefore strength and healing) is directly proportional to our level of acceptance."

- Tim Hansel in You Gotta Keep Dancin'

by Katha Pollitt

When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe
wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling
the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems
unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded romantic notions
that made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife—
Her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels. Perhaps
my body would have liked to make some of our dates,
to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl
with "None of your business!" Perhaps
it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras.
If we had had a more democratic arrangement
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog. How eagerly
it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything,
as though it knows exactly where we are going.

"Jesus did not come to explain away suffering or remove it. He came to fill it with his Presence."

- Paul Claudel

Life is difficult

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult--once we truly understand and accept it--then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth, that life is difficult.

Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race, or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

- Scott Peck

by William Stafford

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can't find them. Someone's terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

"There are no formulas with God. Period. So there are no formulas for the man who follows him. God is a person, not a doctrine. He operates not like a system - not even a theological system - but with all the originality of a truly free and alive person."

- John Eldredge in Wild at Heart

by Peter Everwine

On the morning she became a young widow,
my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,
looked up from her work to see a hawk turn
her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.
That same moment, halfway around the world
in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,
buried under a ton of rock-fall.
She told me this story sixty years ago.
I don't know if it's true but it ought to be.
She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt
on Sundays when the acolyte's silver bell
announced the moment of Christ's miracle,
it was the darker mysteries she lived by:
shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,
a tapping at the door and nobody there.
The moral of the story was plain enough:
miracles become a burden and require a priest
to explain them. With signs, you only need
to keep your wits about you and place your trust
in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck
and grief are coming your way. And for that
—so the story goes—any day will do.

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too
my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the
cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently
to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

http://youtu.be/p18qu4Te9j4

by Richard Jones

It's so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I've done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers' breath.
But instead of resting, I'd smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I'm not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything's fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I'm driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn.

by Gregory Djanikian

It was over a girl,
One boy had spoken to her,
Had asked her out, the other
Had been feeling with her
The twitches of something serious.
It was a misunderstanding,
Something that might have been fixed,
Talked out or around,
But the whole school had turned out
To watch them settle it.
It was too late for talk,
It was no longer just their fight,
Something irrelevant and impure
Had entered it, honor, looking
More upright than the other,
Things which had nothing to do
With the girl, or desire,
Or what she had whispered to one of them
One night in a car.
So they faced each other,
Bringing their anger up
By saying what finally did not matter
But loudly enough so their bodies believed it.
There was a sudden coming together,
There were fists flailing
While everybody, hundreds, watched.
One was cut above the eye, the other's
Knuckles were bloodied against teeth.
It lasted half a minute until
One of them pulled back and said
Something like "This is stupid"
And the other dropped his fists
And watched him walk away

by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety—

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light—
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety—

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light—
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?