Tag Archives: Grace

Song of Sorrow and Joy: 3

11 Saturday Dec 2021

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III

And now, I pause

at the feet of your memory:

Your laughter,

before there was nothing

To laugh about,

Your strength,

Your fatal optimism in your strength.

I’ve learned,

Being a rock, a steady hand

Wasn’t always conducive

To being a full man.

And there is the regret,

(Mine, not yours),

But it’s too late for regrets.

We are who we are,

And so little escapes that reality;

What forms us,

Forms all others, formed me.

Sometimes, we are left to weep

at what could have been:

We could have called,

We could have written,

We could have cherished,

The moments we came

Wanting to be cherished.

I misspoke,

When I said imperfections fade away–

They don’t,

But there is no anger,

Only a dull futility:

The reality that is, versus

What we hoped it would be.

That Day the World Promised to Heal Me

29 Monday Jun 2020

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And then the world said,

I will heal you

In ferns, unfurling again,

berries, growing ripe

On the bows of yesterday,

the ones your hands touched,

As you harvested the wild fruit.

This is my great forest of chatter,

it says, in a smattering of late flowers,

a fragrant, maskless breeze,

and trees you can touch with bare hands.

Speak to the sky, it cajoles,

And the sky will answer you back,

With its bold booms, and its wet clouds,

none of this needs viewed

from behind the doom of plexiglass.

The young clerk, who looked down,

and down, and down, faceless,

behind the many layers of protection.

He was humankind, afraid to look up,

afraid to touch, or speak,

or even see one another.

But the world said,

I remain the same, fully open to you.

See me, and I will heal you.

The Sweet Smell of Starting Over

18 Saturday May 2019

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Even the stars are made of this:

sunshine & sweet petrichor.

What comes from above,

and we are made right,

our thirst, our life—

forgiveness,

after years of anger;

we finally feel love again.

The earth wreaks well of redemption,

grace permeates the dry ground.

And, the only sound we hear now,

birds,

who sing of starting over,

or, at least that’s what we hear,

like the smell of fresh water,

among grass, and clover:

sunshine & sweet petrichor.

Come To Me, I Am Free

24 Sunday Jun 2018

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Hate, stealing our moments

And sometimes our lives,

Hanging on to grievance

As if it were a solid thing,

Like a rock, a sturdy branch.

Someone told me,

Bitterness is like drinking poison

And waiting for the other person to die.

Wisdom, like a real branch,

More solid than grief,

Sometimes, more solid

Than the hurt we carry

Like a bag of stones

Over our backs,

Always thinking our burden heavy,

Unable to set it down

And see the world opening

Like the blossoms of the Serviceberry,

Peeking from under pines,

Saying, come to me, I am free,

And, for a moment, we rest

In their waxy, white peace.

The world is a strange place,

How we look to its ugly spots,

So rare,

Compared to its lovely ripples:

The trembling leaves,

The musty smell of grass,

Blue lakes, like mirrors,

Waiting for us to jump free.

2. Moss

16 Friday Mar 2018

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I found one word,

As we hiked Palisades Park

To the waterfall.

This word coated everything:

Fallen logs, arched branches,

Boulders, and the paths

We slipped upon.

I was shocked. Really, floored,

When, at the end of our hike,

We came away with the same word.

I asked you, and you named it,

Then, I proved to you

I had already written a poem–

Now thrown out for this:

How lucky am I to see life

Like you do? The one I love,

Not wowed by the waterfall,

Or the burbling brook,

Not the caves,

Nor the down-trees,

But the moss that covered that world,

Like your love for me,

Softening it all.