Category: Poetry

Redemption

I know I have a home in Zion
A land where milk and honey flow
A place where all my dreams and desires
Will fade before the One I know

His glory shines above the highest mountaintops
His patience bears me far beyond my schemes
His love resounds when I am lost and wandering
His grace is far too much for me

And yet somehow, when all the past is gone
When all my brokenness is burned away
When all the crimes of humanness have flown
He still retains the core of me.

I have a home where flowers never fall away
Where birds have yet to fail to sing
Where peace and rest are never far away
And where the One who knows me best returns
To put to rest my best attempts to be.

UPDATE: You know how really good music can do amazing things with mediocre lyrics? Yeah. When I wrote this song, I had the most amazing jazz melody going on with it. It was great. So great, in fact, I didn’t really notice that the lyrics were only so-so. Now, a couple hours later, I’ve completely forgotten the melody and all I have left is the lyrics. What’s more, every time I try to reconstruct the melody from what I remember, it comes out really hick/country sounding.

This song is now totally ruined for me. I hope somebody else gets something out of it.

UPDATE AGAIN: I rememberd my cool melody. Song is better now. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from my disillusionment, though.

It isn’t quite

It isn’t quite your holiness,
And it isn’t quite your love
That consumes me when I first get up
On a well-rested morning.

It’s a little bit of both, I guess.
Like the dew of your tenderness,
It covers me so thoroughly,
And makes me want to run, laughing,
And also to sit still.

I don’t know how to explain
What I don’t quite yet understand—
The dreams I have that peel me open
Like a not quite blooming flower
Revealing every earthed and unearthed desire.

So painful to be ripped so gently open
And so grateful when it’s over
So broken, and so at peace;
So unsure of what I’ve just gone through
And so much wishing that it could have gone on forever.

A Little Lack

It is a peculiar quality of my religion
That it holds the broken reed above the straight one
(as no musician would).
The smoking flax is greater than the bright one
Because it cannot help but to announce
That something in its life is lacking.

As something in my life is always lacking.

So it comes as no great shock to me
To find that I am reaching for perfection
And yet to find that I am never quite achieving it.
This little lack is all I have, sometimes,
That draws me back to Him
Who makes my heart to breathe.

Delilah

What were you thinking, when you ran
your fingers through the tangles on my head?
“You don’t really love me,” is what you said,
When you asked me for the seventh time
The secret to my magic strength.

Could it be that for a moment
You actually thought you loved me?
Not the man of titanium, so light and strong,
But me, stubborn and corruptible, the one who
Could not decide if he was meant
To marry Philistines or murder them?

You were my second almost-wife,
My second chance to lay to rest
The hostility between our peoples,
My second chance to prove
There’s not much difference
Between a Gentile and a Jew.

We were so beautiful and so different
Lying next to one another
Fascination and xenophobia
Making love to one another

Did you think that I was beautiful
As I lay there, almost in your lap?
Did you smile at my innocence
As I swept loose bits of hair
That fell on my nose and mouth?

What were you thinking when you woke
Me up and delivered me to death?
“Up and face your enemies!” is what you said.
When they took me, tied me, blinded me,
And laughed at my lacking strength.

Did your insides leap for just a moment
That last time I glanced at you?
Your face was the last thing that I saw.
When you smiled and waved at me,
Did you whisper to yourself,
“At last I know he loves me”?

Apology:

This is not the poem
That I was supposed to write
With little nymphly parallels and
Bold colorful allusions

This is simply to apologize
For the poem I could not write
I could not compress it into
Any kind of form but
Wild, ungainly prose

It’s sitting on my desk now
Wishing it were elegant
Wishing I were elegant
Wishing it were anything but prose

This is how rebellions foment:
A tentative discontent
With the order of the world
A first realization that perhaps
Our gods are not quite big enough
To make us what we want

I do not wish to go about
Putting limiters on God
But perhaps He also finds himself
As frail as I am

Before my work of art
Not so much unable but unwilling
To make the kinds of cuts and dissolutions
That would please another artist
Or even the unnamed longings of the work itself

What can my poem do
To work revenge on me
For never quite creating it
So little power has a piece of art
Over its creator

What can a poem do
But resist my gentle molding
Denying there has ever been
Such a thing as poetry?

Living Fires

I read somewhere
that a flame
is identical to respiration:
The chemical combination
of oxygen with any other thing
both requires and releases heat.

Iron, carbon, nitrogen,
anything combines
when the time is hot enough.
And the turbulent re-creation
is limited only by a lack
of fresh new things to burn.

Like the legend of the man
who fought and fell, and as he died,
instead of growing cold and hard
his body burst to flames.
Intensity alone
makes a flame to glow,

forces us to breathe,
and draws a little line
to separate the living
from what’s only ash and smoke.

One Hundred Baths In 50 Days

I remind myself, as I turn the tap,
Of the masculine image of bathing,
The wild-west ideal: public bath-houses
With cavernous tubs and nearly naked
Women to bring the towels and cigars.
As if I could ever endure the smoke;
As if I could ever let someone close,
So close and nearly naked next to me.

I still take showers for cleanliness sake,
but once I’m clean and dry, I find myself
Kneeling once again before the faucet.
I lied to myself when I said I was
Better, that the shadows of last autumn
Had finally slipped from the washbed of
My mind, like rotted leaves into the soil.

Instead, I find I’m languishing, stretching
Little bits of work to weeks and longer—
Even months. So feminine to pretend
That pleasure leads to action, that languor
Can be transformed into desire, that if
I lie here just a little longer, I
eventually will want to rise again.

It just takes so long sometimes, after a
Little trauma, to learn to breathe again.
It’s so much easier to slip under
The water, to watch the little pieces
Of oil and skin swirling and floating to
The surface, to pretend that standing
water can somehow lead to cleanliness.

I’ve taken one hundred baths in fifty
Days, lying in the water, trying through
Excessive inundation to restore
The fields of memory to something green.
As if such unmanly activity
Could soak out the tiredness from my insides;
As if the bathtub faucet were a spring
Of Lethe that could soothe my troubled mind;
As if I would do almost anything
To keep myself from doing anything.

Man Made Shores

Today I sat on man made shores
and watched a little river flowing
In the course that we had cut for it

I lay down and felt the current
and listened to the water laughing
as it fed the marsh-plants
In the clefts of man made rocks

I glanced left where cat tails stood
four feet high
waving at the wind
gripping the remains
of some prior earthquake

and wondered who gave them leave
to rest there, and who
had bound me in

The Fire Inside Me

What am I supposed to do
With the fire I find inside of me,
That lifts the leaves of my awareness
And yet is not my own?

How could I subdue the flame
That burns beyond my regulation
The living light that is inside me
And cannot be my own?

I am enthralled by mystery
The fire that I cannot control
That burns within and is outside of me
And yet is not my own.

Hot off the presses! Yeah. I just wrote this poem about five minutes ago, as I was trying to explain to myself why it is that I will write poetry, even though I know it’s not exactly a profitable market. Do you ever have that happen to you? I know you do. This little imaginary guy shows up and tells you why you’re wrong and suddenly you’re on the defensive against a figment. Those figments are evil, because they know you really can’t get revenge on them. Right? You know you’ve been there, right? C’mon now… don’t leave me hanging…. Oh fine. Be that way. I’m the only one who ever actually argues with his figments. Anyway, I was trying to argue with my figment and I said (out loud, I think), “Well, what am I supposed to do with the fire I find inside of me?” And that shut him up pretty well. And the rest is… well the rest is in that there poem right cher.