Category Archives: Uncategorized

As for what was inside? An article on Ryan Gosling!

When she stops, the woman builds and unbuilds cairns.
There are long breaths when the stones rest
in the great pockets of her skirt patient as tumors.

They are smooth, cool, innocent. As she walks
her body yearns toward the river. The stones
anchor her to the damp earth, each footstep

an elegy. Sometimes she takes a flat stone and
rests it on her tongue, ballast against the ache
of water on her skin. As she walks, the damp

seeps from her thin wandering body into
the waiting earth. Here by the river’s seam
words are skittish as the marsh birds

her flight startles into the air.  Her by the
river’s edge, she persists. Sometimes
the stones trail behind her, pardoned one

by one. A map. A pilgrim’s prayer. If she
gets far enough away she can read them
like tea leaves, a Braille admonishment

or invocation. She cradles a stone in her palm,
that palm outstretched toward the water,
wondering the river’s word for sacrifice.

Given how much time Mrs. Woolf and I have been spending together, it’s not surprising that she was on my mind. There is more to this poem, but I don’t think I’ll know what that is for a while. I need to keep hanging out with the Goat a little longer.

“A Poem About Other Things”*

I have faith in God. I have faith in science. I have faith that as Jesus walked on water, I can walk the chasm between God and what this world wants to make of him.

Grief is the engine of my tongue, my tongue keeps faith with grief.

We all descend to the dead. We all learn the daily ritual of resurrection. The trouble is sewing up enough faith to come all the way back and mean it.

Even with my glasses on, things are always slightly askew.

I believe that Joseph isn’t mentioned at the crucifixion because God my father needed to send me a secret message about faith, about fathers.

In a borrowed bedroom, my brother searches his Bible for proof that Jesus was only a man.

I believe in God the Father, almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in caffeine. I believe in community. I believe in magic tricks.

When the preacher touched me, I fell back and back. I keep falling till someone catches me, and I am falling now, which is a type of faith I think.

*I’m fairly certain that this poem is nowhere near complete or as long as it may become. It’s bringing together (or it’s trying to bring together, to make sense of) several things I’ve been pondering since Good Friday night: why Joseph isn’t mentioned at the crucifixion in any of the accounts (as far as I remember), the diverse ways in which people use and interpret the word faith, the ways in which people try to prove God doesn’t exist, those moments of disconnection we all feel from God, the difficulties that may arise when trying to reconcile your earthly relationships with your heavenly ones

“Song for a Woman Who is Barren, or Forgetful”

I will never have children

I will never gobble them up to fill days of empty

I will never learn the ache or suck of them

I will not swaddle in their mouths as
they grow old and I grow wintry

I will not insist in them like grief or kiss
a bad taste into their mouths

I will never learn the bone and guilt of them

I will never forget their names nor lose them
in the murk and muck of my love

I will never impale them on the shifting landscape
of my face or hug them with my persistent desert

I will not make promises or keep promises or earn promises

I will not gallop through their nightmares,
part savior, part everything else

I will never have children, and my dear ones,
how you will rejoice
that you will never have me

Mosaic of the near side of the moon as taken by the Clementine star trackers. The images were taken on March 15, 1994. In this view, north is up. The bright crater near the bottom of the image is the Tycho. Photo from NASA photo gallery of the moon.

I was convinced there was no cool, dry space in my brain in which to nurture poems. Grateful to be proven wrong! (I’m supposed to be writing a poem a day for April, and I’m hopeful this is the first of many times we’ll get our (draft of a) poem on on the blog this month.)

“Poem for the Night”

The easy answer is that it began with grief.
the sun dumbstruck, the moon full and sulky.

Another answer is that it began with the moon,
the way it always appeared weeping,

the way someone wished it into a weapon.
The question had something to do with the lack

of sorrow on the knife’s crescent blade, the lack
of a lullaby to outshout the recalcitrant moon.

From outside someone asked, Does it always sob this loudly?
Someone else sang so loudly even the moon had to shout.

Grief, meanwhile, curled into the room’s abandoned mouth.
Silent and sinful as a wolf, it held its tongue.

That indistinct blob at the bottom of the pic are the aforementioned sweat pants.

About six years ago I “inherited” a pair of sweatpants from my mother. While I regularly raid my mom’s jewelry chest when I visit her, we don’t regularly swap clothes as our tastes are vastly different. This was, however, a special circumstance. I was in a rehabilitation hospital learning to walk again after a debilitating bout of pneumonia that had left me bedridden with atrophying muscles for several weeks. My family had bought me several pairs of gym pants to wear for my therapy sessions but the fabric made them too difficult for me to pull on myself with my limited muscle movement. So my mom gave me her pants, which fit perfectly and had the right amount of friction for me to be able to wriggle into them even from a mostly prone or sitting position.

Over the past year and a half as I’ve lost more and more weight, the pants have started to fit less and less well. These days they look downright ginormous, and I’m constantly tripping over the hems now that my thinning hips have made the pants legs way too long for me. Still, like clockwork, I pull them on and head out the door each Saturday morning to browse the farmer’s market and do other errands. I have other stretchy, Saturday-morning-friendly pants, but these are my favorites. They have pockets. And I admit to grinning wildly as I have to pull the drawstring tighter and tighter. Who cares if they no longer fit and, in fact, have become wildly unflattering? I’m used to them, they’re comfortable, and they’re a significant reminder of how far I’ve come.

The thing is, however, that I don’t need them for any of those reasons. I have other comfortable pants. A quick look in the mirror can affirm to me that I’m on the right track with my weight loss program, and I gave back my wheelchair, and got rid of my walker and my cane a long long time ago.

As I was tripping over the hems once again—while making some astounding disco dance moves to Play That Funky Music, I might add—I thought, Hmmm, what else in my life is like these sweatpants? What attitudes or behaviors or ways of thinking no longer fit the person I am today, but are still hanging around because they’re comfortable? Because I’m used to them, and because I can hide behind them? Sure these old modes trip me up occasionally, but isn’t that a small price to pay for the comfort of the familiar?

*Seems to me Resurrection Sunday’s a great day to shake off those old attitudes, really take a look at who we are now, today, and then walk as the person we are, rather than the person we used to be.

*True confessoin: wWhile I’m excited about some emotional and spiritual closet cleaning, not quite sure I’ll be able to let go of the actual sweatpants…but maybe….sigh…

If all you had to do to make sure that the most beloved person in your life had permanent unlimited access to everything it takes to live a successful life was be publicly humiliated, physically tortured, and then excruciatingly murdered in public view, would you? It kind of gives a whole new spin to “What Would Jesus Do” doesn’t it?

This sorta has to do with today’s post, sorta. Well, even if you can’t make the connection, you gotta admit—this particular view never gets old! (Though it is oddly crooked sometimes…sigh…)

The other night for Bible study, I read 2 Samuel 10. The last  verse has really stuck with me:

“Mephibosheth (Jonathan’s son) lived in Jerusalem because he always ate at the king’s table. And he was crippled in both feet.”

We learn earlier in the chapter that M is crippled, so why bring it up again? It seems like an odd way to end a verse, doesn’t it?  But I think the lesson here is deceptively simple: what’s important about M is that he had David’s favor. His disability was second to that.

How many times are we the ones who stop ourselves from walking in God’s favor because of our disabilities—whether they’re physical or emotional or spiritual, or whether they’re real or only appear real?. I think the lesson here is to get out of our own way and take the “seat at the table” that God has prepared for us. While I don’t doubt that God will address what is broken in us or damaged in us or just not quite right in us, we don’t have to wait to be perfect for favor. You know, this may not be a gospel verse, but it’s still some pretty good news! I’m just saying…

p.s. If you’re in the area, please join Advance Church for Good Friday and Easter Sunday services. On Good Friday, we’re meeting at 7:30 pm at the Silver Spring Civic Building. On Easter we’re in our usual spot at the AFI Silver Spring with service starting at 10:00 am.

Today I started my lunchtime walk by praying for a friend who’d been on my heart lately. Next thing you know I’m striding down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the capitol praying in tongues, which—when I moved here more than a decade ago—is not something I ever expected was even in the realm of possibility. Of course, when I moved to DC, I’d been unchurched for years, and I was more concerned with writing better poems and becoming less angry at my mother than I was with engaging with God.

I don’t remember precisely the first time I heard someone speak in tongues, but I know I would have been around 12 or 13, when my mother joined her first pentecostal church and dragged us (or maybe it was just me?) kicking and screaming (at least on the inside) with her. Considering that that particular ministry also had a deliverance* component, hearing people speak in tongues or watching them fall out under the Spirit** wasn’t very shocking at all. Given that I spent most of the service thinking about kissing boys or watching TV or being hungry, it was all just part of the dull roar of church.

I know there are many Christian churches today that believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit—speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, to name a few—-are, to use the technical phrase, “from the olden days.” But I, for one, am very grateful that these gifts are still available to the modern-day believer if we just ask for them. While some of them are based on what God has called you to as part of the church (like prophecy, for example), speaking in tongues is a gift that’s available to any and every believer.

What I love about speaking in tongues is that I get out of my way. It’s not my brain speaking to God, or even my heart, it’s direct spirit-to-spirit conversation. I can’t quite describe the feeling of peace and rightness that comes over me when I pray in tongues. Even if my tone is urgent or frantic, I just know bone-deep that what I’m praying is in God’s will. How can it not be when He’s the one providing the language for me to pray in? I am very aware of just how many times and in how many instances I do not live up to what God expects of me. But praying in tongues, that direct connection, powerfully reminds me that even at my most fallen or broken or even if I’m just being plain wrongheaded, I am still inextricably connected to my God. And to that I say Amen and Alleluia.

*What’s deliverance, you ask? The most simplistic and thus not entirely accurate way to explain it is it’s like exorcism, but it’s nothing like The Exorcist or anything you’ve ever seen in any movie involving a priest, holy water, and a crucifix. It’s much more prayer-based,and, while it can get raucous, most people just yawn or cough or cry. I have never seen—nor do I ever expect to see—anyone’s head spin around their body. So take that William Peter Blatty!

** Yep, I’ve done that too.