I stayed

I stayed
watching the little leaves dance
upon cooling September asphalt
like they knew this will end.

she thinks poetry

Poetry is the only wind my wings know how to fly in. Though, I am in love with the mystery of creation of all kinds; the microscopic planets on our eyelashes are as much art as the universes inside our hearts; everything spins and wants to express something; the caterpillar wants to become the butterfly, but what is the butterfly trying to express? Questions are the genesis of artful thinking. So I am in love with the stranger who tends his lawn meticulously because it says something that he cannot as much as I am in love with the stranger who is in love with something else far beyond tending to his grass and shade. We all have something more to say, this I know like the caterpillar knows; though what is that something more? That is the mystery of the butterfly.

The space, the timefullness Makoto Fujimura describes in his book Refractions is the linen-thin act of whispering more upon paper or crying more upon canvas or molding something more from inside our inner world out. The pain is in the grip and never the release though we protect the inverse of that reality because, well, it is easier. Like praying between snooze alarms. But the courage of unfolding ourselves is lightening from God. Sometimes thunderous and catapulting. But sometimes as simple as a switch. And sometimes not on to light, but on to listening. Listen, listen, listen. His word is everywhere. Upon the mystery of the planets on our eyelashes and in the crevices of our cleaning corners and in short essays of books that bring people together like chapters of a story. Like verses of The Good Book. We are each refractions of each others’ light. The small art space of the blank white page tells me this tonight.

Poets love the symbols of words; maybe it is the poets, by nature of their craft, who can most nearly articulate the highest capability of artists, which is not to create lovely things–which is lovely too–but to have awareness of the symbolism of all things; like metamorphosis, like blades of grass, like love. Like, of course, love. Love is a symbol for God, for God is love; an Entity so incomprehensible and unsearchable that He infused love as the symbol for who He is. Love is uncapturable; try holding love without metaphor or measuring it without scale. But as artists, we try to come as close as we can. Truer art comes when the artist is truer; closer to what they believe they feel than how they imagine others think they ought. Art demands faith; but with the demeanor of Christ. “Come child and create. Represent who you think you are and who you think I Am. Think deeply, have faith, and try.”

I have not written poetry by head or by hand for many months because I have been creating other things like to-do lists and excuse lists and many other lists that I cannot list here. But after reading Fujimura's essay Second Wind today, I listened, God. I tried.

she thinks poetry

She thinks poetry as she sits in cool white sunshine. On a pinewood bench

her four-year-old son splinters thin branches

by the grip of his small hands.

She holds the word but the mid-morning breeze feels too beautiful

against her neck and it lifts her upward gently and with kindness

to the top of two towering oak trees. They cross and turn into shapes of

questions and she asks: Which of you grew these spindly toys for my son?

However did they break away from you? Was it

in a violent storm or self-sacrifice

or did they crack from the weight

of two black squirrels quarreling over acorns for

December?  Her lips are forming answers when –

he dashes in laughter beyond the oaks to search for his balance.

Uneven rocks and airplane arms and

imagination defying gravity. But while she was

ascending the trees

he must have laid the tiny timber next to her feet

in quiet trust

that she would save them for next summer. She watches as he forgets

and her toes tuck the nature pieces

back beneath earth and away

from sight of his memory because it is

in the making,

the trying. in the

breaking

apart and noticing.

She calls his name.

He moves closer inside light and shadows and she wonders

what else may come.

ebb and flow

ebb and flow

wish and woe

sand dollars wishing

to be starfish and

never writing of it.

but yellow is never purple so

she should write about that.


she writes words

she writes

then goes dim.


retreats.


returns shy

but returns

when art and gravity

God and depravity

seek light enough to meet.