New year’s surrender

Surrender weights of the decade 

Shedding what I don’t need

Guilt and fear;

To be fully alive,

Free

Radiating confidence in the goodness

Of my God unseen 

You Came

You couldn’t be kept from inhabiting flesh

And entering the beautiful mess

You yearned for that day

Willingly gave your rights away

With great, exceeding joy 

Born as a human boy

And exhumed the latent role

Of taking back all the enemy stole

On that night all of heaven exclaimed

The King has come to reclaim!

From a little boy you grew

In stature and wisdom as a Jew 

To a man of sorrows who stood

In the depths of human pain, understood 

Taught and spoke such truth with love

Ate and drank and laughed thereof

How people were drawn to your side

Never was a man so fully alive 

Never fearing or doubting the One

Who sent you to show His compassionate love

For such a joy set before you

You drank the cup we were due

And how you loved being among us

Not disdaining our weakness

Full acceptance, words so gracious 

Calling forth our truest essence 

Setting every captive free

To know you, be known and see

Yeshua—- so worthy of worshipping 

Your coming changed everything

Decades

Christmas cards, milestones
days stilled
contiguous lines
of closely fitted pain
continuous grief
tall like Canyons
slowly built, layer upon layer
emptying
an ache
of absence, of space
time can never replace
 "The conversation then drifted, beautifully so, along the contours of deep grief, the kind that lasts decades." -Hank Stuever commenting on Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert's conversation.

Across the marsh

To feel alive

Setting out 

Under ancient oaks, open-handed, reaching

Beneath wind torrents from engines filled with businesswomen and escapists 

The quiet reeds, Golden hued in frozen berms 

Returning as rays slant, nose reddened

And fingers clenched 

A hopeful respite for 

unquenchable longing 

Listening and stillness to mend the waiting that stretches

the steadfast stand, not without doubt 

Searching slips, prayers echoed, questions heralding 

Answers loosed

The bird calling across the marsh 

To know

To see the image of God

To know and unknow

The self, myself, with compassion 

Conscious recognition 

To acknowledge and see.

Acknowledging is knowing

Knowledge being to perceive;

Understanding with intimacy.

The embracing 

Unbracing

Setting free.

Peace

P e a c e

Be within you

Over you / under you

Beside you

Ahead of you / behind you 

Shalom encompassing 

Surrounding 

Rooting, grounding 

Yeshua Himself our Prince of Peace

Guarding, sustaining 

Restoring and 

Remaking 

Christmas Eve at the pawn shop

He walks in, pushing a vacuum cleaner or some other device, 

Candy cane pajama pants and a ski jacket at 3pm on Christmas Eve 

I gaze from my car window, wondering 

And pitying

My judgements reek of privilege and accusation 

The distance between us is two car lanes 

The link between us is 

Deep as grace is wide

Storylines without divide.

Truth and revelation

Truth will always bring a revolution 

It’s based in revelation

Illumination; an enlightened sensation 

When truth is revealed the old ways can’t remain 

The revelation calls forth change 

Music that flows from truth will bring the revolution 

It’s the songwriters, beatmakers, the mystics and makers 

The poets and proclaimers

Who will win the change 

The people’s hearts swayed 

By the truth relayed

“It’s not those who write the laws who have the greatest impact on society. It’s those who write the songs.” -Blaise Pascal 

Practicing

This way of life 

Is a daily climb 

Oh, but the air up here.

I look back; I’ve come so far

I look up; one step at a time 

Take a rest, 

Reach out for a supporting hand, 

Take my time with each foothold.

Slowly by slowly 

I am arriving. 

When I don’t feel proud of this poem

When I don’t feel proud of this poem

This intentional ordering of words shone 

As inadequate

Faulty

Close but not quite

Arching hastily 

Indulgent, melancholy

Poor, proud, or a condescending didactic rant

When I don’t feel proud of this poem

At least I tried

I wrote for me, and I released 

You can judge as you please

When I don’t feel proud of this poem

I will keep writing

Fighting 

Trusting 

Words, from the deep, incubated and born from me will keep 

Coming 

Learning to walk and hastening

To whom ever they’re supposed to reach  

Walking with you

Winter breath

grateful step

hanging loosely

healing ebb.

When I walk with you

In sync I sift 

and grip

love more tightly.

Breath

/in
Full stop
/out

Admonitions

Cultivate your intimacy

Remember your identity 

You are so easy to love

Your weakness and your wounds don’t disqualify you. 

Power

When I take the log out my own eye 

I realize 

How much compassion you have for the striving hamster-wheel-heart 

When I stop pointing my finger at their faults 

And start owning my reactions 

I realize 

How needy I am, God help me to change

How powerful I am, to choose to let go

Lament

I will speak and remind You that O

My God I’m desperate and this is 

Lousy and heavy and 

Hard and if I don’t know your love I think I’ll 

Die.

West on the Broadway (After Wiman)

A shadow jinxing

Under hallowed light glinting

You—ramshackle, divisive 

Broken-down Lowery-toothed

Tobacco fingered rolling cigarettes 

Shin-grinned gums 

Loosed and snarling 

Toward awakening 

Anchored

My anchors, weighted cables compacted deep in the soil beneath the family tree 

Are now surfaced. 

Dislodged after years of stability, 

panic strikes me

I try to breathe

it’s a weeping rasp

I gasp as every relationship in my life is recast

retold in the light of the disease. 

Every motivation

conversation

effort I’ve made to cure

control

cause is exposed. 

The futility assaults me. 

I feel so alone

undone

lost

So much pain in this reorienting. 

Where will I anchor? You’re my anchor, Lord. 

Laying down

I am seeking serenity

It only comes through humility

Below the steeple, voices raised with holy breath

Echo manifold glory 

Expectations descend

Acceptance beckons, hopefully 

The flakes swirl, gently landing on

Dormant ground 

I am laying me down 

It only comes through being found 

I am not alone

It's a field of zinneas cascading into the hills from three years ago.
It's a porcelain music box singing Saint Lucia's song.
It's an orange Ford pickup with a carpeted fold-down backrest, Grandpa's ride, oil and mustiness.
I'm not alone in these memories.

I'm grappling with the remnants
Evil's insinuation "Are you just picking up those dead petals? Aren't you exhuming a body? Dragging along the old?"
The alluring wisp of forgetfulness, a social pressure to put it behind.
"Your grief should be done by now."
I am not alone in waiting.

All these crafted prayers, mistrust and the sheltering of wasps nests.
Here and now,
the bag is closed, the ante tipped over, and the power of my own words break up the crater of death.
All this treading of memories has exhausted me, a tired swimmer far from the shore.
I am not alone in the longing.

I bloom in December
Unbeckoned, my body remembers
My pain exhumed so I can see it in the light
And it's beautiful, this dying, this breaking of decades of acceptance without nuance.
Now adding the details, naming the affliction and the pain is glorious.
I am not alone in taking so long.

Inasmuch

I write, inasmuch
As words are my very life.

postward

it's an initiation,
this grief
a welcome to the human race

the sorrow, the lament, the surplus of tears
the waking ache
the bleeding grace

dispensed with fearful gait, each lap
i pant "will this soul remain shadowed, held asunder"
past, present, future waits

each lap in the dark middle
the uncertainty cast
the tomb is sealed

until i find the pace
is a litany of the warm sap running
over my heart

it's a reclaiming, the deep crying out
deep responds
with self compassion, warm acceptance

with love deeper
than every gash,
wounds being healed from the inside out

Piercing me

Piercing me
The weak capturing of being

Accepting haggard reality’s mean
Deeper risk into the unseen

Perception of the truth composed
The reach

Light into shadow
Cutting clean

A prayer (Isaiah 42)

Offended 

By

Suffering

Taut cheek lines 

The heaviness of the world in upheaval

The dread of my own lot

The riots, the tear gas, the looting, the shooting, the lies, the widows, the hope, the militia, the rumors, the protests, the street strewn with corpses

Where is the blood that doesn’t stain,

The life that doesn’t die,

The breath that doesn’t wane?

The king whose scepter is righteousness

Who hates wickedness and loves 

Justice

Show me this One that came 

Not to remove pain 

But to show the way through

The valley of shadow

The well-laid table 

Surely

Goodness and mercy on my heels 

Oh,  to ever be a firebrand 

marked by love.

Like a knife

His burnt humor, the hard and rusty edge that catches me, 

(For I wait for it)

The bitterness 

(Self-disparaging)

The mirthless laugh

(The eyes averted in pretense)

I pray:

Healing Balm, restore 

Don’t hang onto the old anymore

This one-sided argument

Half and third with moons apart 

And restless ego 

Blanched Misunderstanding, 

Except for such a lean-to frame, 

that heroic jawline and glinting almond eyes 

I’ll happily melt beside 

Oh, but your mother 

Wicker and unforgetting 

A thin smile beckons and grasps 

With hard edged demands 

I cannot but call on the Name

Whose heart scrapes my intuition 

Like a knife along a black bean pod

The Very musk of life released 

In this petitioning 

Among the lilies

Lily,

Stark silhouette 

A bulb of nourishment hence you

Came sprouted 

Deep hued leaves garlanding 

To a pinnacle of ivory

Trumpeted Petals 

Commend your rare and exquisite form

Softly vivid, with sharp edges 

Unto 

Undisputed beauty,

Keen and bright.

Not methods, not plans, but people

What the Church needs to-day is not
more machinery or better,
not new organizations or more and novel methods,
but (wo)men whom the Holy Ghost can use — (wo)men of prayer, (wo)men mighty in prayer.

The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through (wo)men.
He does not come on machinery, but on (wo)men.
He does not anoint plans, but (wo)men — (wo)men of prayer.”

― E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer

I collect

I collect
Books
Of intentions

Jet-lag faith

Maybe it’s jet-lag 

Crossing half the world in half a day;

Time zones, date lines, Meridian markers.

In one night you wake up on the other side 

And you believe anything is possible

So of course we would hear angel’s songs 
In the late evening living room.

It’s not a too far off sort of miracle,

It’s just a flight away,

A ladder’s width to descend.

The dreamer Jacob saw this,
The Son spoke of it before ascending 

In fact He was welcomed by the such voices 

So the song hasn’t stopped, nor ever-

“Glory to God in the highest,”
Arises, same strains sonneted 
From Bethlehem to Istanbul.
Was it the jet-lag to so easily accept 
The praise that came from mouths unseen?
Simple faith to agree that His flamed-tongued ministers are deployed 

For times such as these? 
To acknowledge by faith
Supernatural song belongs in my vocabulary. 
Awake or jet-lagging
Here or there or in between,  
We say, we hear, we agree; glory be.

Intercession and poetry

My son,

I see your eyes;

Weary and restless.

My son, are you patient enough for poetry? 

To sit for a meal, not just a bite?

To gaze and behold, not just look?

To listen for tones, not just orders?

My son, you have been zealous

Release your bitterness from long waiting
Repent your frustration from circumstance 
Restore your heart to first love 
Out of your emptiness I invite you to My rest.

Critics

Who else does this

Puts their precious words out 

Like bread for ducks 

The flock quacks, bites, squabbles 

Until they are gone 

Just 

Crumbs 

Travelogue

Queued bodies
Shuffling between lobbies 

Ground to sky cadence 
Transference or transcendence 

Body’s creases 

Mind’s semblance ceases 

To be under dateline conventions

Air-pressure tensions

Gaining, losing 

GMT arithmetic proofing

A Chronology of before, now, and further seems
Forever dreams 

Was it the end of the world or 
The beginning 

Lemon Verbena

Nicole’s garden, past Damascus Gate

Tranquility abiding in the midst of the bustling and honking; striving 

The sun filters past the branches, a shifting mosaic of shadows 

By season she taught and loved the precious children, ones broken and set aside, disfigured, hurting She blew a refreshing breeze over them, 

And they grew in her care

Now she grows herbs, flowers, 

Cultivated beauty, stacked pots meandering

Shaded by Lemon Verbana

She makes tea from fresh crushed leaves 

For old friends

She grows peace in Jeruschalajim

May she know Peace in Jeruschalajim

Waiting bones

Kidron Valley lined with bones upon bones

generations in tombs of stone 

Facing the gate for the coming One

We wait for the waiting to be done

In the desert

The worst is the ‘shoulds’

The swollen feet

The impatient glares 

The graceless margins, famished for kindness

How can you grow love in the desert? 

One tear at a time 

Palms raised

One understandable phrase, ‘Amerika’ from the driver’s radio

Rumbling of Central Station buses exiting the ramp

From the third seat, my eye level with rooftops where

The fan palms raise their laughing branch in unceasing thanks

Awoken day by day 

Sun’s rays gathering from fragments of night, 

Sideways past the pain with clever perk 

Kneeling, out stretching 

A green plate of contoured grace.