Falling

There are things falling from the sky, some are petals and some are knives, words that cut and divide. Some are tears from eyes like fountains, uncorked from Jeremiah’s cousins. Some are missile shards and shrapnel, freshly mailed from Persia, hastening Armageddon. 

So then on the plain of Meiggdio we will wait and wail, remembering good king Josiah. Armed with tears and promises, until the better king appears and his enemies vanquishes.

Living under heaven

Eyes swelling with tears since the missiles and drones claimed the skies, cascading in a dance between borderlands. Returning to work is what we do, we are strong people. So resilient we are calcified by self protection and singular lenses for survival, biblical prophesies pronounced with every strike.

Jerusalem, I weep for you and for myself. 

In wartime you can slip and fall from the tears that recite Jeremiah’s words, “my eyes are a fountain.” They never stop falling, they are the remnant of shrapnel, yearning for gravity to release their tense pools. 

In the spring you can slip and fall on the Jerusalem stones, slick with rain, and in the dry summer you slip and fall as the sweat rolls down your back, your legs, pooling and glossing the pavement. 

Still, in Jerusalem I am loved, not because my name passed his lips. Or because he declares my breasts will always satisfy him, budlike and tender. I am loved because I exist on purpose, and that is irrevocable. Isn’t the very existence of this city the same? She’s a chosen and contested jewel. 

Below the library window the uncultivated orange blossoms, the fragrance enveloping as you walk under the boughs. Petals strewn like garbage across the street. The orange itself is more bitter than a lemon, more wrinkly than an etrog, a fruit of festival, an emblem of earlier, equally violent times. 

We are exorted to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and as residents we are expected to pick up the psalm books left at the bus stop and declare “peace within your walls, security within your borders.” Blessed are those within you, Oh Zion, and blessed is the one who takes refuge on your holy mountain. 

Defining Desire

In the library of desire, catalogs of historic, modern, contemporary; sex. For Odysseus, irrational seduction until he is out of his xxxxx (controlled by the mind or the belly?) a flame or a furnace? If you shut your ears can you reclaim your self? There is no fire; what is left to return to? Ardent longing, justification for transgressing morality, Faithful to desire alone, not to any bond. Has the satisfaction of a human soul changed over time? What is it that will quench it, by God! O Captain, is it the hunt or the kill? Is it the whale upon your mantle, taunting you in salt-skin from the indomitable sea? Power and pride, esteem and influence, imposing order, conquering the other. To be remembered after you are gone. For freedom while you breathe? Heard in Gaza, the waning desire to live. The cries of children for their children, what life will that generation know?  To carry within the land as it was (and always will be), memory fervent and indestructible. Urges; compulsion, loosing the battle. Steady now, what were you made for? Purposed with breath. What is this stirring, to know and be known, for pleasure and for safety, for release and control. 

taught with tension

Breath and flesh

And fire too

Held in a longing 

A desire responding

Unleashed and yet restrained 

I’m seeking and searching 

We’re communing and birthing 

A life, a love, a name 

This season is about finding the rhythm to flow 

Holding a rope taut with tension and expectation

While apart and until we’re close

 

Becoming a longing

Prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.
-Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, MCS, p. 15

I’ve got

I've got a furtive heart shyly glancing 

I’ve got lists of words and transliterations and translations, Grammar rules scribbled, later found to be unintelligible 

I’ve got a vacuum of dreams; Something about war that steals the hope for the future, the proximity of good too distant to be laid hold of 

I’ve got a weariness in my bones, cold and scoured by the wind of sighs and water of tears 

I’ve got lifted hands, upraised and emptied, waiting to be filled

I’ve got self control, perseverance and joy, I administer compassion to myself and my enemies 

I’ve got a reward I’m leaning into, a face shining from a recent conversation about glory covering the land as the sky encompasses and holds the whole earth 

I’ve got a song, a new song unfurling like a banner, carried by many who belong to each other and raise their voices in thankful union; body and blood communion; held and holy.

  

Journey of things unfair

If knowing answers to life’s questions is absolutely necessary to you, then forget the journey. You will never make it, for this is a journey of unknowables—of unanswered questions, enigmas, incomprehensibles, and most of all, things unfair. -Madame Jeanne Guyon

It is a wrestle

And ultimate surrender: I am not God 

I do not make and I do not save

I am a needy creature

With longings and bias 

And only the creator knows the end from the beginning, 

and is working it all for good.

To trust in your infinite goodness and wisdom 

To rely on your sovereignty 

To press on in faith 

That is the journey.

To accept the things I cannot change 

And change the things I can

That is the journey. 

To keep hoping and loving 

Because you loved me first 

That is the journey.