I Am from the Church of Human Hands

the Hands that tighten the lug bolts on rotated tires,

the Hands that picked the hen-of-the woods

(and not death caps) I buy to make wild mushroom soup,

the hundreds of steady Hands clasping steering wheels on a highway,

the Hands of Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and Kay Ryan

the Hands of the surgeon who replaced my worn knee bones with titanium

the Hands of the man unearthing and fixing the water pipe to the house

the Hands of the engineer who designed the bridge I drive over every day

and the Hands of the ones who built it

the Hands of the pharmacist who counts out the right pills

the Hands of the assembly worker who attached my brakes

the Hands of lighthouse keepers, beacons in the fog and darkness

the Hands of my sisters who make beautiful things

the Hands that pick up the injured, move them to safety

the Hands of the women who forge paths through the uncharted

the Hand that holds a flaming torch on the edge of a country

the Hands that cooked the red Thai curry I ate last night

the Hands of my father, strong, warm, and kind

the Hands that planted daffodils, peonies, and blue irises I see each spring

the Hands that met me out of the womb

the Hands of the woman who cuts my hair

the Hands of Georgia O’Keefe, Mary Cassatt, and Picasso

the Hands of the rescuers after an avalanche

the Hands of the man in the ambulance who said, We’ve got you.

the Hands of my mother, making me clothes, sweaters, and chicken cordon bleu

the Hands of my students, raised and ready to speak

the Hands of my children, so small at first

the Hands of you, how grateful I am—

I have faith in what hands do.

Picture this scene in the Church

of Human Hands—our cupped Hands

holding holy water and maybe we Hand out

Hand-outs, and Hands-down,

everyone gets a Hand or lends a Hand.

Hand over Hand, we rise, do our jobs,

hold Hands or clap our Hands, pressed

together—our best, close at Hand.

 

Sarah Dickenson Snyder, Rattle March 8, 2020

Touched by An Angel

We, unaccustomed to courage,
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love

which sets us free. 

Maya Angelou, journeywithjesus.net, August 30, 2015

It Is Enough

To know that the atoms
of my body
will remain

to think of them rising
through the roots of a great oak
to live in
leaves, branches, twigs

perhaps to feed the
crimson peony
the blue iris
the broccoli

or rest on water
freeze and thaw
with the seasons

some atoms might become a
bit of fluff on the wing
of a chickadee
to feel the breeze
know the support of air

and some might drift
up and up into space
star dust returning from

whence it came
it is enough to know that
as long as there is a universe
I am a part of it.

 

Alexander Bingham, janicefalls.wordpress.com July 20,2022

"The world is a beautiful place"

                 The world is a beautiful place

                                                           to be born into

if you don’t mind happiness

                                             not always being

                                                                        so very much fun

       if you don’t mind a touch of hell

                                                       now and then

                just when everything is fine

                                                             because even in heaven

                                they don’t sing

                                                        all the time

 

             The world is a beautiful place

                                                           to be born into

       if you don’t mind some people dying

                                                                  all the time

                        or maybe only starving

                                                           some of the time

                 which isn’t half so bad

                                                      if it isn’t you

 

      Oh the world is a beautiful place

                                                          to be born into

               if you don’t much mind

                                                   a few dead minds

                    in the higher places

                                                    or a bomb or two

                            now and then

                                                  in your upturned faces

         or such other improprieties

                                                    as our Name Brand society

                                  is prey to

                                              with its men of distinction

             and its men of extinction

                                                   and its priests

                         and other patrolmen

                                                         and its various segregations

         and congressional investigations

                                                             and other constipations

                        that our fool flesh

                                                     is heir to

 

Yes the world is the best place of all

                                                           for a lot of such things as

         making the fun scene

                                                and making the love scene

and making the sad scene

                                         and singing low songs of having

                                                                                      inspirations

and walking around

                                looking at everything

                                                                  and smelling flowers

and goosing statues

                              and even thinking

                                                         and kissing people and

     making babies and wearing pants

                                                         and waving hats and

                                     dancing

                                                and going swimming in rivers

                              on picnics

                                       in the middle of the summer

and just generally

                            ‘living it up’

 

Yes

   but then right in the middle of it

                                                    comes the smiling

 

 mortician

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions Press, 1955)

How to Take a Walk

This is farming country.
The neighbors will believe
you are crazy
if you take a walk
just to think and be alone.
So carry a shotgun
and walk the fence line.
Pretend you are hunting
and your walking will not
arouse suspicion.
But don’t forget
to load the shotgun.
They will know
if your gun is empty.
Stop occasionally.
Cock your head and listen
to the doves you never see.
Part the tall weeds
with your hand and inspect
the ground.
Sniff the air as a hunter would.
(That wonderful smell
of sweet clover is a bonus.)
Soon you will forget
the gun in your hands,
but remember, someone
may be watching.
If you hear beating wings
and see the bronze flash
of something flying up,
you will have to shoot it.

 

Leo Dangel, Home from the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997)

The Chair That No-One Sits In

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.

The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.

 

Billy Collins, Aimless Love (Random House, 2013) 

In Loving Memory of Rev. Dr. Autura Eason-Williams

           Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

 

Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1996)

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

 

Maya Angelou,  And Still I Rise (Random House, 1978)

The Rider

A boy told me

if he roller-skated fast enough

his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

 

the best reason I ever heard

for trying to be a champion.

 

What I wonder tonight

pedaling hard down King William Street

is if it translates to bicycles.

 

A victory! To leave your loneliness

panting behind you on some street corner

while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,

pink petals that have never felt loneliness,

no matter how slowly they fell.

 

Naomi Shihab Nye, Fuel: Poems (BOA Editions, 1998)

My Father Watched Westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would

find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned

to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,

their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father

remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where

law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

 

Faith Shearin, Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2011)

The Mozart Effect

Did Mozart know he was writing

music that will make you smarter?

Or how studies would claim

just being within earshot

of “Two Pianos in D Major”

is equal to reading two volumes

of standard encyclopedias?

That one can measure

improved cognitive abilities

with the passing of measures

is truly immeasurable.

And here I am in the Wendy’s drive-thru

as the classical station plays one of Wolfgang’s

most famous concertos.

It’s an instantly recognizable piece,

flashy, dance-like movement

both forceful and elegant.

It hits me with a jolt—the long dead

circuitry of my brain’s main breaker,

the entire housing unit

of misfired synapses

finally fit with newer fuses

like a rebooted powerhouse.

I feel the points of my IQ rising.

A grand swell of violins

hands me an honorary degree

that was signed by a wonderful wizard.

I, brainless scarecrow,

am now able to square the hypotenuse

of a right triangle

that is equal to the sum

of the remaining sides.

Suddenly a quadruple

two thousand calorie cheeseburger

combo meal with upsized fries

no longer seems intelligent.

I swerve smartly out of line

with some kind of kale

meets plant-based chicken salad in mind.

Kale to the yes!

I yell this as I pull away

to begin a new life with farm-fresh genius—

except that the host

of this classical broadcast

which has recently enlightened me

just revealed that I was listening

to that beef-witted Beethoven.

So never mind.

J. D. McGuire, Rattle #75 Spring 2022

Tin Ear

We stood at attention as she moved
with a kind of Groucho shuffle
down our line, her trained music
teacher’s ear passing by
our ten- and eleven-year-old mouths
open to some song now forgotten.
And as she held her momentary
pause in front of me, I peered
from the corner of my eye
to hers, and knew the truth
I had suspected.
In the following days,
as certain of our peers
disappeared at appointed hours
for the Chorus, something in me
was already closing shop.
Indeed, to this day
I still clam up
for the national anthem
in crowded stadiums, draw
disapproving alumni stares
as I smile the length of school songs,
and even hum and clap
through “Happy Birthday,” creating
a diversion—all lest I send
the collective pitch
careening headlong into dissonance.
It’s only in the choice acoustics
of shower and sealed car
that I can finally give voice
to that heart deep within me
that is pure, tonally perfect, music.
But when the water stops running
and the radio’s off, I can remember
that day in class,
when I knew for the first time
that mine would be a world of words
without melody, where refrain
means do not join,
where I’m ready to sing
in a key no one has ever heard.

Peter Schmitt, Country Airport (Copper Beech Press, 1989)

Losing My Religion

At the Illinois State Fair, I was given five dollars
and allowed to roam the midway. I didn’t want cotton
candy or a corn dog. I wasn’t old enough for French Follies.

Then I saw a kid carrying a giant panda that
looked like a god other prizes might pray to.
Of course, I lost all my money and didn’t win
a thing. Moping around, though, I saw
the same kid slip between tents, return
the panda to a grizzled carny, and get paid.

I was a sensitive child, the sort of little pantywaist
who might grow up to be a poet, so I burst into tears.
A policeman led me to the Pavilion of Lost Children.
I cried loudest of all and refused the awful cookie.

By the time my parents found me, I was running a fever,
and my father drove home disgusted, getting a speeding
ticket which he blames me for to this very day.

Ron Koertge, Fever (Red Hen Press, 2006)

Higher Love

At the emergency animal clinic, I’m standing

in the bathroom thinking the crying room—

big and softly lit, a plant in a corner, the walls

airbrushed in grays and browns. The only place

in the building you can be alone. I remember

meeting a woman one night in this clinic waiting

for her Collie, injury treated, disaster over,

big bill paid. She told me she’d lost count

of how many times she’d been there over the years.

This is the first one I’ve brought home alive.

It’s the 4th of July weekend and hell’s broken loose

out there, the stories I heard in the lobby—bitten

by another dog, hit by a car, ate a box of candy,

foaming at the mouth from some new med.

My own cat 16 years old and stricken down

so suddenly that all he could do was lie

like a fallen tree and watch me through the vents

in the carrier all during the half-hour drive.

The stay is two days, the bill two pages long,

and now I’m standing here in the bathroom thinking

of people crying, though they say I can bring him

home tomorrow, just one more night of fluids

under the futuristic hoses and wires and dark-faced

monitors, his orange body blanketed in a warm balloon

of air while the vet tech types numbers on a pad,

a distant dog shrieking, a sound I can still hear,

that carries through God knows how many walls.

I wash my hands and push through the door

into the lobby and hold it open because a woman

is running toward me, her face swollen as a bee sting,

wet, her shoulders convulsing, a sound drowning

in her mouth. She rushes past, and I don’t dare

look, but I can see everyone—the lobby full, couples

and singles and families, some waiting with a dog

or a cat, some sitting alone with their phones and Cokes

from the machine, maybe fifteen people, every one

looking at her, and—reader, you have to see this—

every one with a face full of love and complete

recognition. No judgment, irony, glad-it’s-not-me,

a whole room of understanding while she pulls

the door shut and latches it to cry for the baby

that I now see—I remember this man from earlier,

how she sat with him in the waiting room when I did—

and in his arms he carries a small body, terrier-size,

wrapped tight in a blue blanket head to foot,

motionless as he bears it through the front door

into the parking lot. I follow him out,

but I can’t see anymore—how gently he lays it

on the back seat, I’m guessing—because I’m

getting in my own car, eyes down, letting him

have his peace alone. To intrude, to help—

it just isn’t done, or I don’t know how, and neither

did anyone back there, though we all know exactly

how high that love goes, most of us with no kids

or ones that are grown, most of us lying in bed at night

with a dog or cat snoring softly in the half-light,

the not quite deep-death night but the still-living kind

that makes us want to stay awake an hour longer,

the air outside alive with tires on the road and those crickets

that only started up a week ago and now sound like

they’ll keep singing that aria forever, even when

we all know sooner or later it will have to end.

 

Amy Miller, Rattle #67 Spring 2020

His Elderly Father as a Young Man

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away—
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed;
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.
Jennie had gone to California
not long after that dance.
I pretty much got over
wanting to see her just once more,
but I wish I could have kept the letter,
even though I know it by heart.

Leo Dangel, Home from the Field (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997)

The Shipfitter's Wife

I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat,
smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I'd go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I'd open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me – the ship's
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.

Dorianne Laux, Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000)

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

 There is no remedy for love but to love more.

 Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless

Jan Richardson, paintedprayerbook.com February 10, 2014 

Pruning

           Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;
           every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit
           is cut down and thrown into the fire.
                           —Luke 3.9

Abandon your cruel cartoons.
God is not coming at you with an ax.

What's unfruitful in your life?
What gets in the way?
God (hallelujah!) removes it.

What do you do again & again
that doesn't help,
doesn't deepen life?
God (thank you Jesus!) gives you
permission to cut it out.

God is not a punitive bully
looking for firewood.
God is a gentle gardener,
looking for sweet fruit.

Let her lop off the dead branches,
uproot the nasty weeds,
clear the brush,
clean up the garden for you.

Sit by the fire.
Enjoy the warmth of your freedom.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net December 6, 2021