Epiphany…..February 10.14…….(revisited 2.20.14)
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Epiphany/Redemption
(for Joan)
Those long-gifted with the radiance of joy—
we expect them to speak, but only words
sweetened with the countenance of hope.
How we love keeping souls
both good and bad, imprisoned:
stay there in the cell where you belong!
But we are called to steal the jailer’s keys
and set all prisoners free!
She herself is finally unchained, unafraid
and cares enough to follow her Lantern down
the dark stairs of love, among cool cellars
and tombs, and brings up the cold shadow-relics
carefully hidden there in buried rooms
and shows them to herself, to us at last —
—see, how the sunlight burns them
of spiders, time and dust, and turns them, glorious
white sea-birds soaring with windblown joy!
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–Quilla
Friday, January 11.13
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Departure
The night of winter rain is gone.
Sun breaks through departing clouds—
ragged silver edges of the storm.
A host of raindrop diamonds glistens
every shining twig, each black brier thorn.
The slightest gust now shakes them down.
My heart is quiet: listening like a flute
to winter’s harsh and delicate muse: throngs
of angry crows, one White-throat Sparrow sings.
Swaths of sudden sunlight wash
the gleaming pages of the Book.
Like carved stones, only the holy words remain.
Rain shadows, heart shadows slip away
like ghosts. A low fire flutters in the stove.
Wisps of smoke ride the morning wind.
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“Heaven and earth will pass away.
My words shall never pass away”.
–Jesus (Matthew 24:35)
“My soul, wait in silence for God only,
for my hope is from Him.
He only is my rock, and my salvation,
my stronghold, I shall not be shaken”
–Psalm 62: 5-6
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–Quilla
December 31.12
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Last Night of the Year
Vast, the ice-blue midnight field:
infinitesimal numberless crystallizations,
brief and delicate structures of frost
cover the timeless winter land.
It’s always been this way:
from smoky caves to lofty steel and glass
sky-towers: everything is given, forming
perfectly before us, then falling away
just beyond the desperate grasp
of hands or words, ever tempting
but eluding us—-infinitely more
than we can hold, or know.
We must learn to stop pretending
and become wise, like children, again.
What perfect sculptures of grace, these
stark birch silhouettes of night!
—lifting to the silence, to the sparkling cold
such empty limbs of praise!
If they could speak more holy words:
pure beauty, wisdom, mystery, one-ness
than those already being spoken
to the listening winter stars,
what, pray tell, would they say?
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“Holy! Holy! Holy! Are You LORD, God, Almighty!
The whole earth is filled with Your glory!”
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“Unless you become like little children
I tell you: you shall not enter the Kingdom of God!”
—Jesus
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Oasis…..(you’ve crossed long years). . .
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Oasis
(A poem for Communion, for Eucharist;
a ‘Medicine’ poem of surrender, of restoration—
for you, for me; in three parts. –Quilla)
1. Loss
Looking back from here—a rugged waste
of lost terrain stretches out behind you.
You’ve crossed long years
of desperate miles, made-up faces,
wandered empty desert places,
weathered the dry flood
of broken rocks and broken faith,
faded smiles, the fallen petals of roses.
Your favorite clothes, and your heart
are torn by long thorns,
now deep-stained the rust of blood.
Your neglected springs have gone, turned
to mouthfuls of bitter dust. Your soul drinks
and breathes the unrelenting siroccos
of human and satanic wind.
Those high-blown scarps of sand
keep screaming beguiling lies at you.
You walk outside the tent, look, and listen:
but wind erased all traces of the trail.
So you’ve learned to hole up in the shadows,
blame others, back against the wall
licking your righteous wounds
til falls the dreadful veil of dark.
2. Oasis
But here, a small sunlit stream comes to you,
bends before you now: the bright green lace
of water licks the broken stones.
In this place, the stream widens out for you
under the cool palm shadows of truth;
with easy grace, the peace of fragrant lilies
pours into a quiet pool.
It is time for you to stop.
Sit down here, take off your dusty shoes,
let Someone wash and kiss
your bleeding feet.
Allow your self: to feel the deeper coolness
wanting to soothe your fugitive, weary soul.
There is no other time.
Let your self receive, rejoice at last.
Allow your heart to grieve, to weep
the salty oil of past, and present sorrow.
Feel what you must feel, then let it flow
into the perfect stream.
No longer hide, or be busy, tough, religious
or even “spiritual”—to impress yourself,
your friends, or God himself.
Give up on all of that. In its stead, stay here
before Him, wait, and be still.
Let hurt go, watch it rise like wreathes
of smoke, like hungry flames
at last burned out of you.
Allow yourself to praise: express the deepest
thankfulness, for all of it.
Let your precious bitterness dissolve,
wash away like yellow fungus, crusted
layers on your hard and tender heart,
let it wash into the quiet, fathomless pool.
It is poured out here, for you.
3. Surrender
This holy war. Fierce battles,
so much blood, and time, already lost.
But Someone you ignored
walked up the rocky hill
and poured your empty goblet
red and full.
The fragrant living Bread
of His being is broken open, waiting for you
to feed: hundreds of pages, furious love, scribed
in the hovering shadows of doves.
Eat and drink—this risen Bread,
this crushed and holy Wine.
All of it. Stand completely healed
in the luminescence of forgiving love.
Savor the alien flavor, delicate scent,
the subtle radiance of halos, spun
with unnamed colors of holiness.
You can begin to hear the songs of birds
and feel the open sky.
Give thanks. It is given, for you.
Yes. It is for you.
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“Your lovingkindness O LORD, extends
to the heavens, your faithfulness
reaches to the skies.
Your righteousness is like the mountains
of God; your judgments are like a great deep.
How precious is your lovingkindness, O God.
“And the children of men take refuge
in the shadow of Your wings.
They drink their fill of the abundance
of Your house, and You give them to drink
from the river of Your delights.
For with You is the fountain of Life,
and in Your light, we see light.”
–Psalm 36: 5-9
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Waking
Waking
(For Farrah)
Slowly the night songs diminish.
With dawning lights, our dreams
lift their thin dark wings, depart.
Shadows walk back into the woods.
Veils of thick autumn mist move through
the old fences, vanishing.
Along the far meadows’edge, tall poplars
stand quaking, yellow, the slightest stirrings
of cool September air.
Like so many people we have known
each summer leaf finally lets go.
And we can do nothing less, or more
than let them.
We hear soft whispers, each one falls
and fades.
Bare limbs remain, so full
of grace, sweeping downward, silently
lift with praise.
Far below winter, or summer
their deep roots drink freely
from the secret springs.
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–Quilla, 9.25.11
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Kyrie Eleison. . . . .
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Kyrie Eleison
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O LORD, have mercy on me. Your graceful power
reach into this tidal cave, your ocean break
and wash this moon-bent heart,
your salt and sunlight search dark rooms of mind.
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Deliver me—generations of a cursing, hell-bent
faulting spirit, bitter venom
poisoning thought and tongue.
So many summers withered, kitchens and bedrooms
bitten, rusted and ruined long before I was born
and since—oh how much damage have they done!
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By your potent grace, replace
that spirit. And fill the filthy rooms your Christ
swept clean, with the gift of PRAISE, heartfelt
PRAISE: to You sweet LORD of morning light;
always here unseen, silent in the storm-tossed night;
LORD of those who proudly claim they’re found
and still more grace given: those who know
(and those who don’t) they’re lost;
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LORD of each beauty, truth and perfect love
wherever we find them—high wind-torn crag,
hard salt tears, soft worn hand,
the long year’s fallen wing of a butterfly.
LORD of this human, this eternal life
your ocean break, reach into this cave
and wash your tides of mercy over me.
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—written after reading and meditating on Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s poem, “A Final Cry”
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Surely I have been a sinner from birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
Surely You desire truth in the inner parts,
You teach me wisdom in the inmost place. ” . . . . Psalm 51: 5-6
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First of December
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The first of December, almost 1 a.m.
The steroids (for bronchitis) wouldn’t let me wind down and sleep. I lost track of time reading, looked up to the clock and saw that we’ve already gone an hour into December. Something feels very different about the beginning of the last month of the year. Now we stand on that cold stone doorstep, the night wind has just blown December’s door open for us to enter. So eleven turns to twelve on our little wheels and pages, as we measure the spinning of galaxies, the inexorable mystery river taking us all downstream. We turn to the last page, with the shortest days, the longest nights, the brightest holi-days of the year. Again we’ve come to the door at the end of a long hallway.
Strangely, twelve does seem more whole and complete than eleven, December than November, in the same way autumn’s dark water transfixes into miracles of six-pointed, six-faceted white crystals. The black streams freeze, wind howls through the empty trees like the ghosts of wolves, the land is hushed and covered white. We sense, we know somehow the white fields and forest are emblematic of an even greater whiteness, lost somewhere in the complex landscape of our souls.
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The freshly-fallen snow can, like nothing else, give us the real hope that somehow “all things really can become new again”. No matter how crusty, how wounded and disillusioned our hearts become, the first snow still dazzles something hungering to be joyful in us, simply and utterly. We feel a high blue wonder emerge again to the surface.
But underneath the glittering lies a silent form of fear we tend to ignore, do not want to face. An existential fear, a shadowy current running far deeper in us than the little fear of driving on icy roads.
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The sounds in the room give shape to the midnight solitude. Chopin’s nocturnes ascend and descend softly, delicately with resigned and melancholy hope rippling the notes, so particular to his music. Beside the bed, on the floor gurgles the humidifier, softly bubbling steam. A comforting sound, like an old bedside nurse, slumped and snoring in her chair. The pungent eucalyptus vapors open my congested lungs, so I let her snuffle and dream.
Of course in the middle of the night at 61, I cannot avoid recalling those tragic and beautiful figures portrayed in film, their final months a miserable coughing travail of spitting up sputum and blood, as loved ones helplessly mutter and watch. Somewhere between the abject panic in those visions and this present culture’s narcissistic denial of “nah, not me, no way” —lies the real truth. If not this, not now, with surety something later will close and lock all our future doors. At least those doors in this terrible and beautiful place.
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And there is the monotonous and seemingly innocuous ticking of the clock: a very old train master at some remote station out on the dark prairies under cold stars, endlessly clicking his long yellow fingernails on the surface of the wooden ticket table.
He is waiting for the silver dawn train to arrive, still hours away. Then he will put away his pocket watch for the last time, pick up his worn-out satchel, and leave on that bright and shining express. Until then, he continues tapping his long nails on the old wood. And we’re allowed to listen to the rhythmic ticking music of this cosmos we’ve been given, to enrich our wisdom, to heighten our brief joys. But as with most things aging, we’ve trained ourselves not to pay him much attention. Normally, we notice time only when we need to do something, go somewhere, or regret the party is over.
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Above and beneath and even through all the other sounds tonight is the steady thrumming of the rain, running down and down the roof. In those wild rhythms we hear herds of horses thundering, storm waves pounding endless shores. Rain has fallen all day and night. By morning the river will be noisy and tall with brown rapids. Much more rain has fallen to the south of us, where the big river is born in a thousand mountain headwater springs.
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For many green months, red and golden days, December sounded far away, the last page on the calendar. And now its first night is here, wrapping thick darkness around our eyes, chilling our shoulders, our homes, the northern half of the planet. Here at the threshold of the month, the front door of winter, we stand before a dark cave opening its mouth into the mountain,where bears crawl in to sleep the long night. Our faces feel the frigid winds blowing out of the cave. In real ways, we do not want to enter another winter. But from somewhere deep inside the cave, we can see a small but steady fire, flickering; softly jubilant music comes echoing.
The joyful songs are ringing from gatherings around the flames, countless firelit faces for many centuries singing deep inside the cold mountain. But the frozen darkness does not, and can not extinguish that little fire, for it burns with perfect love, compassion and total healing forgiveness, for everyone who comes to it, receiving its warmth and light. Nothing is more powerful, or more beautiful in the universe, which itself was created by this fiery Being of pure light.
This is a super-real, holy and eternal fire—not just a metaphor—and it can warm our hearts, our very souls, as nothing else can, or will. And much to our delight we discover this marvelous truth: the longer we gaze into the face living in that fire—which is a Person—we feel it kindling the same fires of love and healing mercy inside our own hearts, burning even into the innermost rooms of our darkened and fearful minds. Wonder of wonders— we rise up out of our selves, and begin reaching, touching others, with His fires of holy love.
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At the Edges (for Stephan)
At the Edges
For Stephan
Just as we feel drawn, as small children
bare feet, out to the very edges
of the land, licked by the sea, to watch with fear
and open wonder, ocean waves
endlessly crashing,
coming at last to wash our little toes
and ankle bones with salty foam,
our shallow footprints in the sand,
Just so, when as adults
we’ve gotten weathered enough,
frightened enough and finally brave enough
to willingly approach, and see:
the broken shells, the jagged ravaged edges
of our beautiful selves, fallen away
like castles in the tide
and wonder: how? and why? —
—it’s then we first begin to see, to feel
the wide beginnings of God, His near edges
running toward us, kissing us like the sea,
the soft salt wind.
And much amazed, we find
if only we allow it
eternal mercy, breaking over us
again, again, again
gentle lapping waves, and foam.
It’s then we start to glimpse
the far and deep horizons
of our need:
a patient, fierce, redeeming love,
somewhere we call home.
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Ruach 333, by Quilla 