I draw a closed square
around my worries
so that they’re boxed
in. So I can contain
them. So I see them
in perspective,
as scribbles in scrawled
ink, less than
two inches wide.
Tag: poem
Psalm 30:2
It takes some strain
to bow to humility
to ask for Help means:
I’ve really reached my
end.
So when I ask, know I’m
Desperate: I’ve run out of
time, excuses, plans.
I called to you –
Oh God! I called.
I asked for help with:
All the pomp & circumstance
of a General in Battle.
Bring your guns, ready
your forces. I’m
puffed up even in
my weakness. The commander of:
My Circumstances.
You were just reinforcements.
But instead,
Oh God! You laid me down
demanded light activity in
the nearest seaside town.
And the unrest, you
promised, would lose its
un-: I’d find the peace of
a Cicada at its end.
And the chaos would be
music and the nagging thoughts
a rhyme. And the world’d still spin around
us both, but we would dance
in time.
Lord, my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me. – Psalm 30:2
attend to life
Each minute doesn’t
have to count
but it has to matter
Each waking eye
Each phase of the moon
Each dawn and
rain
it’s bound to come again
but never with
just the same flourish
or shape or pattern.
It doesn’t have to count
but it must be
acknowledged
Each hair brushed
just so, each sizzle
in the pan and
coffee ground and
alarm sounded
it’s the dance and
melody of normalcy
but not mediocrity.
It doesn’t have to count
but it should be appreciated
Each sigh
Each staring at the
wall and
backache and
hangnail and chore
forgotten
it strikes in the cheek
like a sinus headache
but it dissipates.
It doesn’t have to count
but of course it matters
Each daily ritual
Each daily error
it’s a rhythm, cycle,
slow creek in an often
parched wood
but it persists
It isn’t a counted forward march –
It is a sinewy, strengthening web
of rich matter.
Enough
I am not enough.
I know this to be true. The struggle of the quest to be enough is that it has no blunt ends or signposts or sections in the dictionary.
Enough : being what you need to be and nothing more.
But context is the final definer of the lines around enough and that story rests largely in my perception, my point of view.
I am not enough, I say, because I want to be more. Need is not a good enough end.
And here grace steps in, shaking her head, drawing a circle in red chalk in the center of the blacktop street – telling me firmly to Come In!
I step into the center, see a single word scrawled in bold block letters beneath my feet.
It says, Enough.
See! I am doing a new thing
The planting is hard but
the Sprouting
it hurts.
Imagine! Writhing
Up against nature’s grounding force
through mildewing grime
Would you – human –
with free will, with choice
ever push? Eat dirt,
awaken?
The mums are stronger
It wasn’t their choice
It’s nature
Look! If it’s light and
dew you want
you already have it.
Dilluted/deluded
in your watery
thoughts, you were
already taken Up
You have already fought
You are a golden mum
echoing light on each
dewy drop.
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.”
a poem for Advent
Light of Christ
She held it cupped in her wrinkled palms,
across her lifeline, it burned
And fragmented and grew.
She peered in, squinting hard,
Hands to nose
Stars igniting in her eyes.
She clenched it then, tightly
Pushed it away with the force of her now
elongated arm, like a sigh, or fainting,
or a fervent dance.
She didn’t let go.
Afraid, though, of
The Revealing:
over-exposure,
Conviction – no trial necessary
But it hurt, holding its
heat, its heaviness
She shuttered her eyes
Release.
She knows it’s gone.
She can see the sun with her eyelids pinched tight.
A whisper, a knowing – she musters the courage to
Look.
She is enwrapped in a gown of radiance
frothy and feathered and laden with silk,
A light that imparts light
A glow that reveals, not her own:
griminess, despair, darkness.
The light of truth and love,
The light of Christ encroaching on:
decay, vanity, deceit,
Death.
Embraced, ignited,
A girl on fire
Enshrouded in the revealing and
Holy Light of Christ.
“your life is hidden with Christ”
Wrapped in your own appendages
Fetally bowed:
Warm, blind, elastic
Gently burrowed
Swaddled,
Swallowed.
By the soft skin of
Your mother’s fluid
Arms
Under brown earth
Under dragging feet, under
The whimpers and
Shouts and snarls
Of Toil.
Your heart beats loud
With the hum of
Happy Solitude.
Awaking then to
Endless, White, Blankness
(here, finally, content)
Of the hiddeness of Christ.
meditation on fear
Observe the browning leaves:
do they worry
as they die, and fall
and fall to graying earth?
Do they fight and struggle
and scratch against
the muscled fingers of gravity?
No.
They willingly go to decay,
to shrink,
to crunch under foot and
Not return.
They green in strong winds
and spackled springtime light alike.
Then, knowing it would be so
all along,
They die.
Give their pigment up,
fearless,
joyful, willing us,
Hope.
time and season
I wrote this in May, but I feel that sense of nostalgia – of hope and loss – now, too.
Your limbs half bare
in May
in Florida
Resisting summer
or too lazy, or
dying?
Your limbs grew wild
outstretched and crooked
in those early
days before you
really
knew
you were alive
Do you regret
the growing over
time and season?
Do you regret bearing
children on your arms
and standing still
when storms, surely
hundreds now,
washed over you?
Perhaps it’s too
much, and too
hard
to grow back,
bring back,
all that you lost
again,
and over ag-
ain.
Leah Wise 