I am a Stone

I am a stone
Stone of the deep world
World cut from sharp rocks
Rocks hard as eons
Eons of pounding surf
Surf and sand and soil that stirs
Stirs the depths of ancient strands
Strands that weave into sounding life
Life of mounding and moveable earth
Earth that cradles my stony self
Self told in bone
Bone that is unknown
I am a stone.

I am a stone
Stone of the heart-force -
Force that rolls and pelts and stills
Stills me to solid polished gray
Gray as the shade-cool river bed
Bed of the earth
Earth that is ancient and new
New as the now, lost as time
Time locked in geodes and crystals
Crystals that cut bone
Bone that is unknown
I am a stone.

Give Me a Weary God

Give me a weary god
One who knows what it means to bend,
To take a knee or bow a head,
Emptied, cast down, enslaved.

Sustain his rebellious spirit.
Pull a guilty glory from his likeness.
Turn his grace upon those heavy hearts
Who are struck together by the tempest.

Behold that spitting form,
The backward shame of heaven,
Spewing disgraced insults.
Help obedient hearts defy that high name

That name that sets himself above the cross
And puts every death to shame
For the sake of inglorious human vanity.
Confront his hateful ways and curse his tongue
For reviling humane earth.

Slaves stand with wounded hands
Confronting bold-faced adversaries - flint-skinned, taut-lipped.
Regard their stricken, burning backs.
Exalt their wounded tongues and ears.

On this bare morning we stand together.


- inspired, reconfigured and crafted from Isaiah 50:4-9 and Philippians 2:5-11, Palm Sunday, March 2018

The Basket

I am an astronaut awash in stars.

I am a shipwreck survivor,
  collapsing at last on the shore.

I am a burrowing hermit crab,
   slipping in and out of safe darkness.

I am a weary traveler resting under a tree.

I am carrying a basket of souls,
   and being carried in the basket.

Memorial Hill

Sitting on the hard edge of the past
our conversations punctuated with stars
and lack of sleep
we tangle and untangle
thoughts, selves, souls, hearts, limbs.

Behind us, the Memorial -
calcified, unchangeable -
petrified lives engraved in granite,
an homage to the carnage of glorious war.

Before us, rolling into verdant growth and open air,
a hill, cascading down from our feet to
a field, wide and waiting for play, and
a forest ranging deep and rising away into
sky, vast and shifting and rich with sunrise,
the scents of lifting flight
and all the blooming atmospheres of tomorrow -
of what could- may-will be -
eternity.

This pause, this sitting-on-stair,
this meeting of flesh on stone,
is all that we can rightly call
Now -
a thin edge -
a molecule of a moment -
a word that falls into space -

a kiss to vanish on your face.

-Amherst College, Reunion 2018

Breath and Twine

Have the courage to breathe,
Breathe compassion,
Compassion for the world as it is.

Is there room to breathe free,
Free the fluttering wings in your chest,
Chest that rises and falls,
Falls with the ocean waves -
Waves of despair and hope?

Hope swells, crests, sweeps
Sweeps the shores -
Shores of souls,
Souls entrusted to our care.

Care comes in boxes of twine,
Twine around fingers, hearts, lungs,
Lungs straining against the world,
The world as it is.

Is there a way to weave,
Weave twine into baskets,
Baskets that hold such a wavering thing,
Thing that ebbs and flows,
Flows through our fingers,
Fingers that weave twine,
Twine into baskets,
Baskets that hold hope?

Dormant Tomorrow

Buried in darkness -
Dormant, asleep -
Growing in secret,
Preparing to rise,

Past selves are reborn
when new voices shout,
demanding peace
as only the young can.
Tomorrow belongs to them.

And us?
The gray ones
Weary with wisdom
And life
And loss
And the slow ticking pace
Of our worn and beating hearts?
We step with soft footfalls on this earth,
behind the stomping feet of their warrior dance,
tending the next row
of sleeping seeds.