Stand
in the same silence
I
am a crooked man who lives in a crooked house
built
upon the shifting sands of this old tidewater town.
When
my neighbors gather, ask me to explain myself,
I’m
at a loss – there’s not a single motive left
to
pull from my bag of tricks; no excuses,
except
maybe, God made me do it.
But
many of them don’t believe in God
and
the ones who do, don’t believe in God the way I do.
They
picture Him somewhere
on
the other side of the galaxy
rather
than moving amongst them
on
my unkempt lawn.
I
no longer offer explanations –
none
of them speak my language.
And
when they leave me to myself, only I believe
that
it is God who lifts my hand to wave goodbye.
O
child of God, stand in the same silence
Your Saviour employed
to awaken the world.
Poetry
and prayers
I
pray for a chapbook of the heart
with
a cache of prayers hidden in its folds.
I
pray for poetry and prayers
free
of words – silent as my Beloved;
poetry
and prayers without a forethought
or
strategy, requests or praise;
without
beginning or end;
poetry
and prayers
that
reach the eyes and ears
of
others only as an afterthought.
I
pray to become a poem myself –
upright
and earnest, an inspiration,
a
living prayer that breaks its silence
only
by repeating Your name.
O
child of God, pray your poems are received
as prayers by your
readers and by your Lord.
Evocative
verse
You
may have noticed this poetry
is
often comparable to scat syllables
or
the mumbles of a drunk;
the
babbling of a baby
or
the tra-la-la of a nursery rhyme.
This
poetry is what is stated when the poet
has
run out of metaphors and resorts to incoherence.
The
most such a poet can offer is to target those readers
who
also have run out of words,
hoping
they agree that intent
and
context are more important than meaning
and
like everything else in this phantasmal world,
human
comprehension and God’s perfection
remain
an inexpressibly vast ocean apart.
O
child of God, the wordsmith shapes evocative verse
from the hesitations
and inconsistencies of his own vocabulary.
The
Original Whim
After
a perfect sweeping and raking
of
the ornamental garden the old Zen monk
shakes
the limb of a slender maple tree until
a
few of its scarlet leaves fall upon the sand.
I
scroll across a video ad of two beautiful couples
in
an outdoor setting sharing a laugh together
and
sipping dark red wine. The video is AI –
perfect,
pristine and phony.
We
want our lives to be perfect,
often
to a point approaching farce.
That
sort of perfection is not for us mere mortals.
Life
is change, growth, discomfort and decay.
Perfection
is static. Perhaps the Original Whim
was
for God to free Himself
from
His own eternal Perfection;
to
shake Himself out of His habitual Exactitude,
to
know and witness Himself bit by bit
in
all His infinite aspects and permutations.
O
child of God, life is not a pond, it’s a river.
And God is the
infinite Ocean of Existence.
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