O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel, you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. I was content in the cloister, safe from wildness without until the day a door was left ajar. My heart escaped … Continue reading O Key of David
O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples; before you kings will shut their mouths, to you the nations will make their prayer: Come and deliver us, and delay no longer. From the beginning You created more than things but hid in them a seed of Your life force, for Love cannot make only one, embedding life in life, from life. You … Continue reading O Root of Jesse
O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire and the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai; Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm. When I dare approach with closed lips and open heart, a new sense is awakened: love. Still and real, textured with presence, heavy lightness, true. My ambitious mind attempts description, … Continue reading O Adonai
I couldn’t tell you when it went absent without leave but one day I noticed it was gone. The last shred of possibility slipped out the door. You adjust. The sadness becomes mortar for a wall just high enough to keep the dream from getting in finding its old place where it fit in so well until it didn’t. We resigned ourselves to a good … Continue reading Advent: Elizabeth
Annunciation to Joseph Steady, old boy. You can believe your eyes. Admit it. This is not unfamiliar, this mystic hope that shimmered in the shadows that day as the sawdust settled under your restless feet. You can believe what her ears heard, what she told you, how the messenger revealed the mystery’s shape hidden within her innate devotion. You can do this. The raw material … Continue reading Advent: Joseph
One of the exercises in my creativity group last year was to incorporate the title of a song into a poem. This one reflects a favorite hymn that was not in the anthology of those we sang in my childhood, but I learned as an adult and came to love. I love to sing, in choirs, in the car, at bedsides. I am grateful that … Continue reading Giving Thanks
When I unwrap the holiday ornaments the stiff snowflakes pause a moment in my hand, fashioned, starched in precise geometry by my mother, who stitched frugal threads into transcendence. Once I presented her with a bedspread from my husband’s family not quite finished, a long-forgotten interruption. She studied the pattern, dyed the thread to match someone else’s story, not unlike her dutiful life as pastor’s … Continue reading Lace
Splash, rumble, plink, whoosh, Plop, mumble, bang, sploosh. Clang, jiggle, roar, ding, Thrust, giggle, vroom, fling. The onomata runs around attempting to be freer, but he cannot escape the sound of his pursuing poeia. Continue reading No Escape
I cannot put the glory into a poem. The Kyiv Chamber Choir sings “In Thy Kingdom”, their voices resonating, swelling in what I picture as a beautiful cathedral. How they cannot make this beauty now. How they are scattered and the church is a shell where the music cannot carom off its walls but its memory flies into the atmosphere as a prayer. Dissipates. How … Continue reading The Music Over There
Winter Day in Nebraska I glance out, see the geese stitch the sky over Interstate 80 their ragged, urgent arrows aiming somewhere east southeast no big deal but they keep coming prophecies sliding like hieroglyphs against a cave wall of grey clouds as “I Got the Boy” blares on the pickup radio reflecting on the passage of time without resentment: “She got the future, I … Continue reading Winter Day in Nebraska
saint sinner seeker 