Tag: Poetry

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

Zachari’s Song

Lost in the middle of a great big wind
My heart is on the fly
Then I heard Your voice and it’s drawing me in
I think I’m gonna cry

I heard mercy, on the wind
I heard freedom, calling… when

My heart is drawing
I will follow
Now I’m kneeling down

I am Yours
I cannot help me
What a thing is life to me?

Freedom found me
I must follow
You are life to me

I cannot
Help but listen
You are all I have

I stand up
My eyes are glisten-
ing I cannot see

Here’s my cross, Lord
give me a road
as I follow

I am not alone

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.

You Are My Offering

You are my sin offering
You are my first-fruits offering
You are my only offering
Is you

And I am free to offer up
Everything I have
When all I have to offer up
Is you

(3-1-00)

Some theology goes with this poem, I think: Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that, in the Old Testament, there were three basic kinds of sacrifice.

First was the sin offering, where an offering was made in substitution for what was owed to God. I commit a crime; I deserve punishment. The ideal repayment is that some or all of me must be destroyed to atone for my trespass. The sin offering made a substitution for my own life by offering up something to be completely destroyed in my place, the ideal example being a perfect, spotless, male yearling lamb.

The second kind of offering was the first fruits offering, where an offering was made in kind as a token of what was owed to God. The basic idea was that everything I have comes as a freely given gift from God. If it belongs to God, by all rights, I ought to give it to him. Unfortunately, the laws of nature (and of giving) prove that I can’t. If I give everything I have to God, and he keeps it all, I will die. This would sort of defeat the purpose of God providing for me in the first place. There’s also the scriptural principle that you can’t give more than God. He has assured us that he will abundantly return our gifts to him, so attempting to literally give everything to God simply leads to this vicious cycle. The solution is to give to God a portion (say, a tenth) of what he has given you, the first fruits of what you have gained from His benefits.

The third kind of offering is the wave offering. This offering has nothing to do with what is owed to God. This is the only truly free-will offering because it can only happen once all your real debts to God have been paid. If a person finds that he is particularly grateful to God for something, he finds some way to symbolically represent the thing that he is grateful for. He goes to the temple and he waves that symbol before the altar in the shape of a cross. It is entirely a ritual act, and has no value outside of its symbolism.

The cool thing is, two out of three of these offerings are covered by the of Jesus Christ. I think everyone who is basically familiar with the concepts of Christianity is aware that Jesus on the cross is the ultimate and final expression of the sin offering. The same goes for the first-fruits offering, in most ways. (I hesitate to say in the area of finances. That just occurred to me. Must think through…) There are scriptures (I forget where) that say that Jesus, as the first man that ever lived a wholly righteous life has become to God a kind of first-fruits of the sons of God that the whole earth is waiting for. Also, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and perishes, it yields no fruit. Jesus would be the seed that was planted, and he would be the first fruits of the harvest that is to come at the end of the age.

What can be left for us, then? Jesus said that the law prophesied until John and that not a jot would pass away from the law until all was fulfilled. (please forgive me for the lack of references. I’m doing this on the fly.) It would be a very easy thing to say that, if the laws of about sacrifices were a prophecy, then when that prophecy was completely fulfilled, then the sacrifice would pass away. Jesus was our sin offering, and lo-and-behold, all sacrifices for sin, the whole world over, have passed away. (I know, I can’t exactly say the same for the first fruits offering. I’ll leave it be for now. I don’t have time to properly do research.)

The only offering that’s really left for us is the wave offering, and what is every act of worship, but a symbolic act of gratefulness to him. Literally, worship is the only thing we have left to give Him…

It’s an interesting idea, anyway. That’s the sort-of theological basis for the first stanza. The second part is just a statement of fact: I can only give everything to God once I have laid aside everything I have, so that Jesus is all I have left to give Him.

Yeah. And it sounds so much better in poetry.

Blessings, all
KB

On that Day that I First Met You

On that day that I first met you
And I looked into your eyes
A fire settled in my heart.
You burdened me that day.

With a love so great as that, I felt
That I must learn to love as well
And I have been burdened
By the depth of your love

In the days that I have born
Since that frightful day
I have strained, I have burned, I have cried
No love so great as thine.

I cannot do it
To love so great as thee
To fulfill my burden
You must love through me