Awe

One time,
when my eyes were very large, and filled with tears I could not explain,
I saw you.

You showed yourself to me, for a half a second, for eternity. My heart could not bear up the wonder of your story, nor my mind cache your glory. There are fractured images, cartoonish now in memory, and that feeling, that caused me to weep with awe.

Bare arms with a golden arm ring, light flashing off your mail. You are victorious, naught could stand in the end against your purity. There was love, and sacrifice; a thousand times rewarded. There is hope, carried through a thousand dark nights until at last it blossomed in light and joy. Your hair is tossing in the wind, crimson now like the blood you had shed for love. There is a wind blowing off the mountains, and where it touched there is no fear.

But most of all, I was comforted. I had been sick with despair that you were small and fake, imprisoned in a few deluded imaginations or confined to a screen or a page. But in that moment when my eyes were opened it seemed you were huge, real, in ways that I was not, nor could explain. I felt flat and two-dimensional compared to you, in that eternal moment I realized you were looking in, and I was looking out.
 I was a creation, finite with limits and boundaries. And you, with all your mighty descriptions, hero of the infinite mountains, could see me. You are personal as you are infinite. You are more real than anything a thousand human minds could ever hope to compose. And I will one day rejoice to see you face to face.

Frustration

 Listen carefully: the universe is at war. Holy fire billows in the void, dark storm fronts of despair crackle and flash with all the colors of fury. Armies are sallying forth from the heavenly places, swift-footed agents escape certain capture. Legions of evils fountain up wherever the thin fabric of the mortal realm punctures, leaking across our world like a spreading pool of ink. We here in the finite world are both soldiers and battlegrounds, both waging war and being waged over.  Every little word and thought is as a bolt of fire and a thrusting sword in the reality beyond reach.

I can hear it, sometimes. The music playing in my dreams the moment before I wake. Though I can never remember the tune, my whole soul reverberates afterward. I see the effect if not the cause, like the invisible wind tossing a tree's limbs against a gun-metal gray sky.When you know you've heard the song, nothing else matters. We are notes in the song, pages in someone else's story.

Do you see it? Those rich red-brown autumn colored hills that spread off out of sight? The morning mists that hang over millponds and dewy fields? Those pale morning skies that soon give way to the deep blue of a crisp november day? They are not just in one place, nor in a single memory. They transcend memories, are too real and too big for place or time or human understanding.

I can feel it at times, mostly when I was younger. The gentle sting of a morning breeze stripping away layers of sleep. The feel of waking, of being alert and aware of wondrous things: mountain slopes and flushed dawn clouds and that wind blowing in your face. Deep oceans of peace and mountaintops of joy.

For split seconds I think I have seen the people who live in those mountains, maybe only begun to understand their majesty. Great sacrifices and burning loves and indomitable heroes are in those lands; heroes who never die and wear a thousand faces.

And so I remain, staring with hardened eyes before you, my heart filling up with sadness. It wells up from a grief at what should be, and in my childish dreams deferred they boil up as anger. No, I love you still, more perhaps as I learn more of you. But with every word, thought and deed that honors the darkness's sovereignty it grows in power over your heart, and I see the stars that shine upon you dim from a spreading cloud.

I am not some righteous bastion of faith, that need choke out my enemies like a tyrant. Evil does not offend me, it grieves me, as I watch it poison the spirit world. Colors fade, and the song from the infinite mountains grows hard to hear. I am pained, choked as if on ash by the evil that pervade us in this realm. That which serves life gives me life; that which serves death, to me, is death itself.

So please forgive me, for the sudden tempests that sweep across my face. I am weary, and walking a long road to my home.

White Washed Tombs

I've lived in a graveyard,

in a country that's hot.

The tombs are painted pretty

like a candy shop.

I met a woman who told me she Cared,

about places where kids lived with dirt in their hair.

But you know I think she was sad and couldn't stop;

since she'd murdered her baby at the Happiness Shop,

It's where they sell you your youth back at the price of your heart;

So she held up her sign, to cover the rot.

I've talked with a man just a bit too angry for me,

he was raging about sins he'd never achieved.

Boy, he was on fire about another man's hell,

I couldn't get close, but even then I could tell;
 he was afraid of his silence, and what it would say

if he gave it a moment to kneel down and pray

If he just stopped for one second from yelling to breathe,

we'd all hear the quiet where his heart used to beat.

Well I was pretty pissed with the tombs

I figured they ruined the world,

still I didn't want the streets to have more folks like me;

cos I was broken and rotting and ugly to see.

I was corpse with a stomach that was turned in disgust

at the white washed walls hiding bones turned to dust.

But one day in the graveyard a Live Man appeared,

he was human and hungry with dirt in his beard.

"Tell me," I asked him, while I rattled my bones "have you come to seal me in a tomb with a stone?"

For darkness was what I wanted, and it was where I'd end up;

laid out in silence and consumed by the rust.

"Answer me, Live Man!" I begged through my teeth "what is it like to feel hunger or bleed?"

"Do you thirst?" He asked, and my anger was spent; for I had been dead for so long I'd forgot what that meant. Of all the corpses that rotted I was the worst; for I knew I was broken but I'd forgot how to thirst.

"Live Man," I rattled, shaking my bones "I am not worthy for you to stand in my home. You are Forever, and I am undone. I will crumble and perish far from the sun."

"Tell me," he said, as he stretched out one arm "can these cold dead bodies ever be warm?"

The clouds rolled away and a wind started to blow. But I said only in a whisper:

"Lord, you know."

"Look around you," cried the Live Man, as the winds began to moan, "can I raise up my children, and put flesh on their bones?"

I covered my face and spoke real slow: "Oh God, you know."

The Live Man bent down and whispered in my ear: "I am willing, be healed."

He took me by the hands where only bones should have been; There was blood from his wrists and it washed me clean, he put a heart in my chest, and when he opened my eyes:

All around me were people, real live people.

 Wearing the clothes that the Live Man had brought.

 I looked at each neighbor and I didn't know what to say:

The stone on each tomb had been rolled away.

 

An introvert's review of the past year

Year One-and-Done. I think of all the people who simply were there.

For all the people who give a constancy to my life. Kind partners or friendly strangers, people who said Hello.

Awkward conversations, well trodden shallows like sports or how college was going or the weather, people who knew my name at and said it and nothing else. Sometimes that was all it took. If you have a name then you belong.

Greetings in hallways, two-minute chats. The people I only have something to discuss with after a test. How I treasure those.

People who would walk the way I am going. Maybe to the food trucks, maybe as far as the train station. Correlating routes; those precious intersecting minutes of companionship.

How much I owe to frustrating assignments, authoritative professors. The inexhaustible resource of mutual resentment, griping, bemoaning. How irritating it must have been for upperclassmen to listen to. How happy it was to have something to talk about.

The company of open laptops and lunches. Silence broken by farewells and vile conversations that were welcome conversation all the same. Eye contact and a greetings worth more than money. The reassurance of belonging.

And most wonderful of all, the people who made invitations; never gave up asking, never decided that enough initiating was enough. Said hello from awkward distances, asked quiet people for opinions, invited strangers like me.

Each and every person, whether I spent a moment or an hour, I remember. Your faces and your voices come and go in my memory, sometimes they are actors in my dreams. For you, your interactions may have been mundane, routine or natural, and they were. They were so much more, though. For me they meant the world.

A Poem for That Good Night

Given to me on a hill by Dylan Thomas's father. 


I remember the morning-
it did not seem long ago,
when all my life were simple things,
that melt like passing snow.

I was rich in the morning,
they laid treasures in my lap;
Days and weeks and laughter:
All that mortals have.

I spend my riches quickly,
they slip through my hands like smoke;
the money you can never earn,
the currency of hope.

Because my day was never mine to choose,
nor my birth by my desire,
I will thank the one who gave me life,
I know He will raise me higher.

A gift, this little passing life,
not mine to hoard or waste,
I must hold aloft my prize
until I see His face.

And you of little faith; my heart,
may bless, curse, even rage;
but know that he who gives the hour
has overcome the age.

A poem about Purity

Lord, make me new as the sunrise,
Lord make me pure as the rain,
that I might be as free as the wind,
or honest as pain.

Lord, make me whole as a mountain,
by placing Zion in my heart.
If I wish to walk with you,
I guess I must be set apart.

A life spent chasing the whispers
that reach my heavy ears
would not be a story ruined,
or a waste to all my years.

If now until my death I walk,
in lonely hedgerows before the sun,
I will not say I wished for better,
if at last my race is won.

There are heroes in the stories
that wander, righteous, filled with grief.
Theirs is sadness, theirs is mourning,
in the hours before the dawn.
Theirs is triumph, theirs is laughter,
theirs is love, and endless song.

Something For Valentines Day

My dear,
I recall all the little things,
that made me love you.
None of them make any sense,
like the way you walked
or how you spoke
one cloudy day.

I can also think
of the three big things
that make me think of you:

that you trusted me, when distrust was what I would have done,
that you respected me, when I was not sure if I respected you,
and that you chose to be you, without realizing it. Without pay or reward. 

A Poem for Train Platforms

This poem was found taped to the bottom of a train schedule, and was titled: "For all those standing on train platforms." I believe that the writer was having the first good day he/she/it in a long time.


The storm clouds are tall and black-
I should know, I made them.
lightning snaps like aircraft flakk,
but I close my eyes and ignore them.

Demon faces; all my fears
take shape in the clouds around me.
Though they howl into my ears,
I know I will keep flying. 

The darkness is all that I can feel,
And hope a thing I cannot find,
But I'm your little bird, my God.
And I'll fly blind.

All that seems real is this mountain of steel,
crushing all hope and joy from my mind,
but I'll be your little bird, God.
and I'll fly blind.

I cannot feel your palms cupping around me,
nor your spirit walking before me,
Nor your power, flowing through me.
So I will disregard my 'reality'
and fly,
eyes closed,
a little bird,
in a fake storm,
blind.

A poem for days with Wicked Winds

A Poem. Found in a greyish-brown slush drift piled high on the side of a street.

When the Wicked Winds of Winter
come slashing down the street,
I'll meet them with a toothy grin and shuffle slushy feet.

The wild wails of panic, the drums of progress too,
will only the get the smallest steps from my heavy leather shoes.

But oh! to hear you voice, to see the beckon in your eyes-
and lo! these frozen lanky legs of mine, they'll swiftly spring alive!

I would caper like a new-born calf or march like tall marines,
or dance because it would make your blush and say I caused a scene,
I would talk ten thousand frozen leagues across these wastelands white-
To be with you and hear your voice and know you were alright.

A Child's Poems

These are a list of poems I found in a child's sketchbook. The age of the child was retro-estimated to be approximately five thousand years old, because this is an immortal elf child we're talking about. I am placing these here for safe keeping, and also in case someone needs to write their thesis on what sort of poetry five thousand year old elf children write on midsummer's eve under the moon.

The Ship

Its many sails were taut,
caught in the breeze.
Its anchor was all coiled up,
like a silver snake, around a tree.
Its rigging was like a spider web;
and men were many flies,
except that the men go living-
but the insect dies.

Its cannon were all  ready,
to blaze the night away,
its keel was good and steady,
 eve in the wildest fray.
Now i've told you all you need,
except one thing you should rightly heed,
though the seas be fierce,
though they toss you up and down,
be you loyal and honest,
to your kind and crown.


The Faerie Queen

The Faerie queen was clad in green
and danced beneath the hemlocks tall,
the trees made a roof for a woodland hall.

The hemlock boughs,
they made a wreath
or perhaps for the sun a shining sheath
and for moon's soft beam

the Fearie Queen was clad in green
and danced through a mossy dell,
for there a crystal spring didst well.
And far away she did go,
and where she dances?
No man does know.


The Tree

The tree is green, perhaps a sheen lingers in the boughs?
If so then I might inquire why, and how. But there is something sacred, in mystery as well as fact, so I will stop to wonder and forget what my knowledge lacked.
A heavenly host (five, ten, twelve at most) surrounds the tree. They hang from little silver strings as if hovering daintily.

We anticipate that Holy Date, when we open all the gifts. And as that day nears at an exciting rate, (as Christ did anticipate, his fallen flock to emancipate,) we gather round the tree.

Beneath the Stars

Darkness covers the sky,
revealing other worlds,
lifting the roof on high,
the moon shines like a pearl.

The trees whisper about wind,
making way for stars,
yet night is never blind,
torches wheel by hours.

Like lances they thrust their light,
piercing void with spears,
looking down from highest height,
they will shine for countless years.

Stars hold many stories,
gazers claim when and why,
but for us they hold a lesson,
to be diamonds in a dark sky.


The Shore

The ships go to and fro, from port of sand
searching for a rumor, a tale of a long-lost land.

The gulls are crying to the sailor,
 the gulls are crying to the sand,
 they are crying of a rumor:
a tale of a long-lost land.

The ships go to and fro, from port of sand and stone,
going far into the west, far away, alone.

the gulls are crying, the gulls are crying, 
the gulls are crying amongst the sand, 
they are crying to the sailor, of a tale of a long-lost land.

the ships go to and fro, from port of stone and wood,
trying to bring a Godly thing into this sinful world.

The gulls are crying to the sailor,
 the gulls are crying to the sand,
 they are crying of a rumor:
a tale of a long-lost land.

The ships are leaving harbor, leaving ports of gray,
looking for their celestial kin on a hill, far away.

The gulls are crying to the sailor,
 the gulls are crying to the sand,
 they are crying of a story:
a tale of a better land.

The ships have left this darkling world, a shell of empty sin-
they sail to that humble hill to join their angelic kin.

The gulls have cried, the gulls have cried,
the gulls have cried amongst the sand,
they have cried to the sailor, of a tale of a better land.


The Wind

The wind was whispering in the trees,
 like a silent silver lance,
a short lived wintry breeze tht chose the leaves to dance.

the wind was singing among the stones, like a sad and solemn bird,
speaking of some holy bones, buried beneath a christian stone, to a sleeping world.

the wind was roaring in the rocks like a lion for its prey,
a roar that at the Nemian it mocks,
shattering the stillness of the night and echoes into day.