Patient habits

We are going to live with aching exuberance
We are going to exult in our famished spirits
We are going to wonder and awe until we get new names
We are going to rest and release
We are going to protect and punish
We are going backward so we can go forward
We are battling and lovemaking, stopping and sprinting
The heat is rising; I contemplate contempt but I relapse into forgiveness instead; it’s a habit 

Ringed

 I always thought I would look down at my ringed finger, relieved and secure in my knowledge of being chosen 

Instead I find comfort in his ringed finger, Moved by his sign of commitment, more than my own token.

And finding that even this monumental human commitment feels small and fragile, certain as we can be in our unknowingness;

And that the creator’s steadfast covenant is the truer foundation, where I built my life in years of waiting, a true home never to depart from.

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