Anxiety (parentheses)

What you see and don’t see, how you divide your unfurled gaze, unguarded and vicarious. Coasters for tea and liminal spaces between snowfalls, neglected gardens dormant beneath. I will ask questions and enjoy our anxiety together, in our aging breast’s lumps and nightly wakefulness and torrents of doubt. Striving at being curious instead of recklessly judgmental, until the overhead speaker intones “Your tenure is almost up, young lady.” If you don’t cauterize the wound you’ll find (die of) infection. 

 

The Night (December 2022)

The city  beckons for Emmanuel's song
to color its walls.

Creation groans for children's seeds
sown in tears to sprout a harvest.

Heartsick waiting, bone deep hungry
for light to banish darkness away.

To be still and with burning hope
raise voices to join the chorus bright
and color the night.

Prosidy

Every word is a translated thought, a transliterated feeling

loosing color and physical sensation 

becoming vibration 

from my body to breath, 

vocal chords tensing together, the friction of life.

Prosidy, this attempt to melodically 

describe the flight

from synapse into words 

from me

to you 

it's more than a syntax’s span

it's eons and lands

centuries and alphabets 

darkness and light imbeuded on these hinges of sound

strained into symbols strung together, the creation of life.

Corporate aches from the Holy land

What writes a rinse of honesty

shed blatantly 

amongst amateur pilgrims and operations specialists 

this is a corporate rumination 

a detached elongation 

of awareness forgotten until revelation r
                                                                  e 
                                                                      a c h e s again

pulled from the well's depths

the hydrogenated salve heralding

bottled, branded, sold, 

a certified holy rinse to un-save a soul

What do you want

Do you want

Do you want a god

Do you want a god devoid of mystery?

Safer to inhabit a structure containing systematic thoughts of the divine 

Conveniently retrieved from the shelf to justify or condemn 

this teflon cased religion, impenetrable. 

Or do you want a

Do you want a god

Mysterious, yielding and unyielding, incarnate, dead and resurrected, better than you can hope or imagine.

“I don’t need a god who is the mirror image of my own misguided understanding” -Andy Squyres

December

Morning light, diffused through clouds upon the ground's white garments, 

A cloud break and the snow is shining, radiating like the moon, as if snow's light light comes from within

Above bare branches, stark against the gray

Fragmented lines creasing 

Frost breath, bone chill

December.

ארץ / الأرض the land "ard"

Peace and land

Land and peace

This aborted peace process

Attempts in cities and camps, Presidents bullying and chagrined, washing hands with Jacob's water, proclaiming "I am innocent of this blood," 

Decades later the process of peace is a byword

War within and without 

Factions, prisons, weapons, checkpoints

This agony of absence 

over UNWRA generations, Holocast generations 

Can I have peace if I don't have my land?

To have the land but no peace;

To have no peace and no land.

All we have is might

All we have is resistance

Whose land is it? 

Is it the title? Is it the one who is present, or was present? 

Whose dominion will last? 

Kingdoms rise, nations fall. 

Epochs end. 

The land remains.

The land; it's not yours, it's not mine, 

it belongs to Allah-Adonai. 

Whose land is it, justice asks?

Mercy replies, it's for all the children. 

Oh, Land, Land, Land, hear the Word of the Lord. -Jeremiah 22:29

Ahead or behind

Fragments and finales

Every moon an irrevocable turn 

I've been on a dreamcloud walking out a destiny 

Unsure I still have faith for

That longing, when stirred

All consuming 

Disordering, course-shifting

Do I trust the plotted destination or the guiding hand?

Do I trust the resolution or the voice in the wind?

Looking ahead or behind 

Staying present, right on time.