February 26, 2018

Warmth Borrowed

By viewingcamelot

I’ve walked these streets
Since my bare childlike feet
Stumbled unknowingly
Over glass and stone
So desperately alone
In my blood and my bones
Within throngs of hardened faces.
I still remember these spaces,
Hungry and graceless,
Exploring, hoping to discover-
To unearth, to expose, or uncover
Some version of safe, or love, or
Home.

Home- that secret fantasy repeating
In all the orphans’ tiny beating
Hearts- ever keeping
The fire kindled, the native
But long forgotten language
Like the memory of a pledge
Not yet redeemed,
But always blooming unseen
In the hidden depths of dreams,
And hopes fallen as wilted petals,
Blackened by the cold metals
Of bustling souls and pedestals
And ashes.

I looked up but once, I know,
There in the window, a glow
Of candles, and smoldering souls
Sharing some spark of smile,
Of tender warmth, and I, beguiled,
Lost the hard miles,
The frostbite, the feet that bled,
The serpentine paths that led
Through frigid humanity- instead
I fell in love with all I saw through the glass
A world unknown, unsurpassed,
Beyond my grasp,

But the only thing I’ve ever seen.

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February 10, 2018

Proximity

By viewingcamelot

I called on You last night,
And You were there.
Closer than a brother, fairer
Than ten thousand- mighty,
And tender.

They tell me how to speak,
How You would have me,
All reverence, or all intimacy,
As the King, or the Seeker,
Or the Savior

Narrow forms of appeal
And I quake with fear,
But You play no Lear
To my clumsy Cordelia
Or my calls,

Through all their intimidation,
I cannot remain unspoken-
I call on You as one broken
In childlike trembles of desperation
Looking for a Father

And You’ve never waxed pernicious
In my improprieties,
So patient with all of these,
And ever the God with us-
With me.

I called on You last night
As just me to only You,
As with all else we’ve been through
You showed up and made it right,

Looking at me through You
That I may be lovely in Your sight.

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February 8, 2018

Pass the Time

By viewingcamelot

Passing time
Like the proverbial buck,
Down in the mouth,
Down on my luck,

And checked out.

Passing time
Onto someone else’s shoulders,
Easier still than making the most
Of growing older,

And numbering my days.

Passing time
Like a passerby,
Wasting smiles, wasting miles,
Wasting the days until I die

Working so hard to pass the time
As though it exists in endless supply.

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January 23, 2018

Late September

By viewingcamelot

A skipped beat- so swiftly I remember
That rotted stump of tree
Felled in late September
Amid the pale anemones.

It’s stature carted, splintered, stacked,
And now reduced to ash,
Taken by a sudden attack-
A severing metal clash

There, the stump sat in grief
Impotent roots clutching dirt-
Rotting in its disbelief,
Nothing but scars relived its worth.

There, its secret hacked to earth,
It made a room for yours
Within the pulp of inner girth,
It contained its tragic stores.

How long the days have pressed to pass,
Wild adventuring laid to rest,
And I’ve neglected your crevasse
That rots now in my chest.

I haven’t called on you, old friend,
In the many lives I’ve borne
While the one that would not mend
Stays ever hidden through the storm

In the rotted husk akin,
Weak and weatherworn,
To all that might have been!

 

Calling on You

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January 22, 2018

Turn, Turn

By viewingcamelot

Maybe there are times
We should distract ourselves,
To refract or dispel
The troubles that shine

On our diminished souls.

And perhaps, in due course,
We nestle into today’s sorrow
Knowing the day may end tomorrow
With sudden rejoicing, weeping remorse,

Or starting anew.

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December 21, 2017

The Windsong

By viewingcamelot

Winter advances in age
Skeletal fingers in frozen decay
Touch me; All the rage
Of the summer sun melts away.

I stand in the silence of clarity.
I see you, in the beauty and the biting cold,
Breathing through the disparity
Of seasons turned, and youth turned old.

Wispy exhales of hope and yearning
Mourning moments that have not been
Snowdrifts of lost nostalgia churning,
Swirled and stilled by a disquiet wind.

I miss you
Twinkling in the warmth of joy and proximity.
I exist in these moments, undone and overdue,
Mingled from conception to infinity

And I am Yours
Whatever I have been, I am still.
Weathered storms, lonely roads and crowded wars,
But I feel you here in the hushed chill,

And I love you still.

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December 15, 2017

Eventide

By viewingcamelot

Even if
The brightness of the sun
Slips beneath my horizon view,
If the tremulous touch of darkness
Scatters my assertions askew,
Though the earth never cease its spin,
You cannot be moved.

Even if
The blackest sorrow finds me
Doubts, like earthquakes, shake me,
Cracking along my fault lines,
If grief herself breaks me
I am never beyond the reach or repair
Of Your immovable hands.

Even so,
As I struggle with what’s in me,
The sin that strips the world bare,
Leaving brokenness, our destruction,
The inky depths of our despair-
Through the dark night of the soul
I strain to see, to believe You still care.

Even so,
You, the God who cannot be moved,
Are moved for me.
The God who weeps,
The God who bleeds,
The God who strives,
The God who sings
Is moved to sing over me.

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November 9, 2017

Least of These

By viewingcamelot

I close my eyes
She appears again, in the haze
Of spent years and separate ways
And tears bent to earth.
Her moment torn open,
But she no longer remains
In the flowing wounds, the stains-
Her broken fragments of being.

I close my eyes,
And they’re ever kneeling
In like condition: healing,
A foreign concept- a mythical beast.
Love, a foreign language,
A muscle rarely-used,
A notion much-abused
And deeply mistrusted.

I close my eyes,
And open my heart in prayer.
You brought me here from there,
And I was too blind to remember the route,
But I remember You,
And the day I learned love was tangible,
Solid, substantial,
And I could receive it,

And I could give.

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November 9, 2017

Here and There

By viewingcamelot

Surveying the broken bits
Of former glory
Remnants of Your story
Before, behind,
Sometimes we find
New roads to lay, new avenues to pave ahead
Your church,
But sometimes the work is to
Rebuild again
What once has been
The best we can do.

Building the walls,
Repairing the gate,
The mud and nail and wood and stone,
After life, while it’s late,
But maybe no one should build alone.

Yet the work spreads out in all directions,
And the workers are so few
Perhaps it’s harder to view
Broken down things
Than move on to what is new.

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October 21, 2017

Returned

By viewingcamelot

These nights, these dreams
Pull poetry
Kicking and screaming
From some instinctual,
Guttural place inside of me
Wherein I must hide
All the wonder and dread
Once interpreting the world
Spread out before my eyes
Of flesh.

I treat it as a child’s toy,
Faded, torn, missing pieces,
Carried past the age of reason
A thumb in the mouth,
Plumbing the depths,
And four fingers cemented around
Some leg of its being.
If I leave it wherever I go,
I come home to find it
Laying just so in my bed.

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