A Certain Prayer

Shrouded, in the fog of war, in billows of fumes and debris,

Are those alive still -- ear bones numbed in the daily blasts.

Here, spotless lambs are imprinted with this hateful carnage.

Our Father, which art in heaven, 

Hallowed be thy Name.

Bodies with gaping wounds and spirits pray a dying hommage,

As creeds of fellowship again give way to the ancient castes,

Disdaining God's image in kith and kin, in hubris and decree. 

Thy Kingdom come. 

Thy will be done in earth, 

As it is in heaven. 

These horseman of ours, war, pestilence, famine, and death,

Each angel, demon, sapien-kindred souls, blasphemers all,

In baleful visions of gory, starve, disease, injure, and kill.

Give us this day our daily bread. 

To the cry "give us a king" -- submits to a despotic will,

Tramping o'er bloody sod, it's mass grave under a pall,

The fallen erased, their stories without living breath.

And forgive us our trespasses, 

As we forgive them that trespass against us. 

And lead us not into temptation, 

Groaning to the hills,  mine eyes water at the horizon,

These are my people. The murderers. And the murdered.

The cost of our idolatry binds each of us in it's chains.

But deliver us from evil. 

Though body and spirit are old, I await renewing rains,

To find grace in these killing fields feels patently absurd,

Unfit for the Eucharist, where God Loves each denizen.

For thine is the kingdom, 

The power, and the glory, 

For ever and ever. 

Amen.

Bonds

My beloved,

My love,

Ten years since whispered promises became spoken vows,

In dovetail step, our path, with grass trodded into the turf,

Morning rites and evening rites -- day and night on earth,

Shape our communion below sky or wooden boughs,

This sweet sacrament of the ordinary,

A diamond forged from common coal,

Love, love, love in our common places,

Now beloved, arise, do not tarry.

My beloved, 

My love,

Many a morn, your eyes open to my dawning gaze,

Like any morn, as the choirs of first light mustered,

Somnolent eyes, equivocate beneath their luster,

That we might abide in rest, and in sharing our days.

This sweet sacrament of presence,

I -- inwardly, outwardly stirred,

Love, love, love, in our quiet spaces,

Now beloved, abide with me.

My beloved,

My love,

In sundry ways, all the woes of all the wide world,

Settle in our bones and spirits; the body keeps score,

Of heartbreak, bloodshed, and sorrow, now, evermore.

 Afar God's country pilgrims we, with flag unfurled,

This bitter sacrament of pain,

Met with eyes of burning coal,

Love, love, love, in broken places,

Now beloved, endure with me.

My beloved,

My love,

On this anniversary, joy overtakes this troubled heart,

Where our commonplace foretells the beatific vision,

As our paths transfigured from earthen to elysian,

With seraphs, in awe. The most beautiful lover imparts.

This rich sacrament of marriage,

A communion envisioned by poets,

Love, love, love, that leavens the whole,

Now beloved, in grace, heal with me.

The cup, the bread.

The blood, the body,

Alive in God,

In love with you.

The Curtain

 

As day hours lengthen, seasons sway back and forth,

In this alchemy of time, the world pitches equinox,

Morning air crisply fragrant with buds and thaws,

Tranquil.

Between now and forevermore, a pregnant pause,

Epiphanies sweet symphony, God's verba and vox,

In luminous transfiguration -- creation shows its worth.

Thankful.

Upon a certain path by a mirrored tranquil pond,

The water translates the skies in beatific vision,

Elysian synesthesia, words and senses so moved,

Ecstatic.

A form of heaven and earth, in the pond infused,

Colours burn with more substance, and precision,

The curtain drawn reveals what is beneath and beyond,

Hypostatic.

Clouds, birds, trees, but also cars, homes, and neighbours,

Each most actual in the pond's echo of their ethereal forms,

Might we all exist as shades of what is real, what is beautiful,

Transfigure.

This passing glance avows these days are sallow -- merely liminal,

Yet also bespeaks that higher and farther, an embrace transforms,

Such that every breath partakes of love, an exhales in a prayer.

Linger.

Bruised Reed: Palestinian Easter

 

Lo my Jesus, bloodied, bruised, and battered.

When Caesar and Pilate, when Priest and Elder,

Confound kingdoms - Mars preens Messianic.

The least of these, hearts and bones shattered,

As wails and prayer anguish.

He will bring justice to the nations.

He will not shout or cry out,

    or raise his voice in the streets.

Lo my kin, bloodied, bruised, and battered,

When powers collude. -- political, ecclesial.

Wolves in Lambskin prowl, canines bared,

While wee broken lambs, unseen, unheard,

Die mid wails of anguish.

A bruised reed he will not break,

    and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.

Lo the weight of the bloody, bruised and battered,

This cloud of witnesses, Saints, angels, martyrs, 

Bear witness to this deafening, soulless silence,

Millstones of the apathy of those thus hardened,

Plumb the faithless in anguish.

In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;

     he will not falter or be discouraged

till he establishes justice on earth.

Lo my Jesus, bloodied, bruised, and battered.

Brother to survivors of holocaust and Nakba,

Saviour to the broken and the brokenhearted,

Redeemer to all the mighty coldly scattered. 

Hear these prayers of wails of anguish.

Open eyes that are blind,

    free captives from prison

    and release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

Rachel Weeping: Christmas and Gaza

Advent eventide, where light shines in the darkness,

The obsidian envelope still cedes to it's piercing amber,

As the ebbing year's wilting calendar heralds the birth--

Yet lullabies falter as trembling voices in thick lament,

In wretched wails of prayers -- receiving no answer,

But the bloody, bloodless cold, the taciturn starkness

of void.

A voice is heard in Ramah,

    weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children

    and refusing to be comforted,

    because they are no more.

A Son of Man, heralded by angels, and star charts of mages,

Is born in squalor in the land of promise, a land of violence.

Mary's child survives slaughter,  a refugee in our gospel story,

As horror to neighbours or kin, as infants bloodily dispatched.

Save for angel hymns, for kinfolk weeping -- scathing silence,

As was in the beginning, is now, even to the end of the ages,

Of waiting.

Advent to epiphany -- Emmanuel with us, still shrouded --

In silence. History seems trapped in perpetual ordinary time.

The mercy at hand, in word and water and bread and wine,

And Spirit-peace o'er all wafts through the rent temple veil.

Still, this peaceable anthem is stifled, like the muted chime

Of church bells in war time whose peeling rings are clouded,

In the fury.

Christmas cancelled in Bethlehem,

Rachel weeps for her lost children.

Children weep for lost parents,

As Palestinians Kin,

To every Genome 

Of our lost Humanity, 

Can wait no more.

Advent eventide, where light shines in the darkness,

The obsidian envelope still cedes to it's piercing amber.

A light for revelation to the Gentiles

And a glory for the people of Israel.

Ode to a Son in Law

 

When a girl child is no longer a child,

And begins to look under new leaves,

Questioning, discovering, and loving,

New loves, new places, new thoughts,

A parent -- or step, both joys and grieves,

That inevitable call that beguiles.

One day, came he whose eyes adored,

Formed in faith, and a rich imaginary,

Wise and wisening, behold him inweave,

His heart, his life, with hers, and then ours,

Joyful, trusting , tearful  -- did he marry,

Thus bound sweetly in these tender cords.

As days to months to years, our fellowship,

Enriching our circle in punnery and poise,

As seasons season with mirth and melancholy,

Incipient creases reveal a depth in his soul,

As in all-- testing reveals his metal, the alloys,

Of Matt, husband -- even in son-in-lawship,

A good man,

We are proud,

To love.

Place

Butterflies flutter fly, mid twists of trees,

Pale-winged, like jittery petals in the breeze,

Regents in a world of pollen -- budding blooms.

Intricate pixies -- fragile as breath, ever looms,

Their finitude,

The shadow of death.

Paired wood-doves alight lightly on some twig,

Chestnut plumes weaved smooth, heads preen a jig. 

Ever content cooing a haunting melodic longing,

Beckon bird choirs to the grace of every dawning,

Of their given days,

Of their given breath.

Swarming cicadas  -- trilling crescendo gives them away,

Still unseen as a smoky sky charcoals in the dusk of day.

From depths emerging, for this time, to call and respond,

Their season to mate, to spawn, and be predated upon,

'Til their ranks dwindle,

And only silence is left.

One wanderer wandering in his waning summers,

His steps fall heavier, his frame yields, he lumbers,

Contrary to fellow creatures -- a sojourner out of place,

Averting the beatific vision, like the parents of our race,

Beloved and yet breathless,

Before the very life breath,

Of God.