My soul constrains me to sing:

You have done the things
You said You would do-

You have not left them undone.

The only honest response to You
Are praises forever sung,

In strains of Hallelujah! God Most High!
Hallelujah, Most Holy, Most Wise
Shepherd who never deserts a lamb.

Hallelujah, oh Great I Am!

For the part that was their sin,
I forgive them again
With warmth in my sprit this time.
For my part, forgive my crimes,
Blend these shadows, weave these hours,
Cause the deluge to grow the flowers;
Work all things together for the best
To those destined to enter Your rest
As I fully believe You are doing.
I wait for You to sing
Over all our tiny tragedies;
Realign our gravity
With You as our center.
Carry us through dark winter.
Form unity among disparates;
Your every odd child inherits
That promise

And Your promises
Will prevail
Your word
Can in nowise fail
It remains ever True.

And in full view of my sins,
In the humility of repentance,
I aver my belief
In Who You Are
What You Can Do

What You Are Already Doing
What You Have Already Done

I Believe You.

I tried to take something here
That doesn’t belong to me
In broad daylight:
Brazen thief

And they pushed me back
Knocked me hard down
I blamed them for
Hard ground.

I must have believed if I found a stately
Abandoned oak in the wood, lonely,
It wouldn’t mind so very much really
If I grafted myself into the family tree.

I’ve been
A foolish dreamer
Shame on me for taking hold,
Refusing to let go when I saw the demeanor

Said No Trespassing.
Purple marks on the founding trees
Left their purple marks on the roots of me,
But the sun will shine, and the miles will see

The nomad smile again
In kindness true
At strangers
As I’m destined to do.

And I’m leaving here
Wiser.
The one mistake
I will never duplicate.

How foolish of me
Fighting to plant seeds
In a patch of my own land.
I am always free.
I have a hundred homes
In the back, by the window seats,
Where I can watch the world turn
Anonymous and unseen
Sharing warmth with warm souls,
But if they curse me
I move on empty-handed
With no grudges to keep
Because no one owns or owes me
Anything.
Whatever their squeezing fingers,
In hunger or brutality,
Try to pull off the bone
Dies with me when I flee.
Purple fingerprints
Don’t stain like ink, not indelibly.
I’m a sin-eater
Moving alongside reality
Absorbing the dark
Dispelling it with esprit.
No coarse hand
Can kill beauty.
I follow her trail
Smiling quietly
With the other travelers
Who can also see.

I read somewhere,
Or maybe I wrote,
Every woman dies with her mother.
Some dependent connection
Gets severed; You drift
A star without orbit
Spinning aimlessly off-course
Love in complexity
A multi-stranded cord
Unbreakable
Suddenly frays, snaps, is
Lost.
Lost…
Lost is the cord
Tethering your identity
To the old world, to her world,
The land of your origin
Amniotic antiquity
You almost remember
Through her own sepia memories
You absorbed
And the chaotic days
You fumbled through
Seem insufficient
To fill the void
Of her story
A world dies with her
And your roots lose the earth
And clench and gnarl into
Empty fists
Empty fingers
All slips through…

The little moments:
A sneaky smile,
An heirloom skill,
A chance to glance
Into the future, to see
What a girl grows up to be.

I have seen a million adventures
In coves and camps and creeks.
I have battled beasts and pirates
On the rocks and on high seas.
I do not foresee old age;
I cannot retain where I have been.
Every day is the only day;
I live it again and again and again.
I tried to fly my way beyond the borders
To some soft land where I could build
A home, a life, but everyone’s a pirate;
It’s all kill or you’ll be killed.
I am not a pirate; neither am I a man.
Whatever I am, I cannot know for sure.
If I could only get the hang of it, I think
To live may be an awfully big adventure.
But somewhere a clock is ticking
Somewhere it’s counting down
When it chimes, all my times
Dissolve into the clouds

And I will be forgotten
In the same way that I forget-
All my days of grand adventures
Fading into one last grand sunset

And someone else’s sunrise.

We are all here alone
Empty hands and broken hearts.
Standing side by side
We are infinitely apart.
Through the brief window of night,
This solitary life, lost in the darkness
Of unknowing and unknown,
One star interrupts in starkness,
But all who believe will follow
Urged by simplicity or cleverness;
Inhabiting the same space
Doesn’t equate with togetherness,
But by starlight we can better see
Each other exposed, uncovered.
Drawing nearer to the Centrality
Pulls us closer to each other
As a child, that star was miraculous
But my weak frame now understands
In our immiscible sin, it’s a miracle
When we clasp hands.

What he did to her was wrong

And so she ran so very far away
That nothing could ever make it right
Now, too late, she regrets the day
Weeping bitter regrets for taking flight

For cutting off their unfinished song.

She pelted him with needs

Until he was happy to let her go
To build a simple life inside the breach
But the purpose he was made to know
Stayed forever out of reach

Half-a-century later, the day still bleeds.

What was kindled at the Christmas tree
Culminated into Calvary
The Perfect, The Unbroken Prince,
Knelt under the grief of brokenness
And through decades of blood and sweat
Suffered, and gave it all, paying our debt.
Sometimes a rich man, for reasons he knows,
Will pay the foolish debt another man owes
But what rich man would be beaten and die
To ransom his enemy’s son from the pig sty?

In all of human history, only This Man
Left abundance so great
To fulfill His Father’s plan
To sow a seed of Love into the heart that hates

And the harvest still produces.

It’s hard not to notice
God’s paradoxical bricks
In the wall of history
Today’s two sticks
To rub together:
John the Baptist was conceived
As a mouthpiece of God
The Voice, in arms received
By a priestly mediator,
A first-time father, a man
Silenced by doubting
But according to plan

Named his son
By His Father.

Doubting conceived
Silent waiting
Which stretched and birthed,
With his wisdom abating,
The hope eternal
Of God’s sure Word.
Once confessed,
He was again heard,

And his son’s voice
Still echoes.