Blessing the Dust

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

 

Jan Richardson, glennumc.org March 1, 2017 

Marked by Ashes

Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day…
This day — a gift from you.
This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received.
This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility.
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home
     halfway back to committees and memos,
     halfway back to calls and appointments,
     halfway on to next Sunday,
     halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant,
     half turned toward you, half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday,
   but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes —
     we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
       of failed hope and broken promises,
       of forgotten children and frightened women,
     we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
     we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with
   some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes
   anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you —
   you Easter parade of newness.
   Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,
     Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;
     Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth.
   Come here and Easter our Wednesday with
     mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.

 

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People (Abingdon, 2008)

A Sight

 

Last night I watched a documentary on war,
and the part I carry with me today
was the spectacle of a line
of maybe 20 blinded soldiers
being led, single-file,
away from a yellow cloud of gas.

That must be what accounts
for this morning’s brightness—
sunlight slathered over everything
from the royal palms to the store awnings,
from the blue Corolla at the curb
to a purple flower climbing a fence,
one gift of sight after another.

I couldn’t see their bandaged faces,
but each man had one hand
resting on the shoulder
of the man in front of him
so that every man was guiding
and being guided at the same time,
and in the same tempo,
given the unison of their small, cautious steps.

Billy Collins, otherpeoplespoems.blogspot.com, October 12, 2020

Life Expectancy

On the morning of a birthday that ended in a zero,

I was looking out at the garden
when it occurred to me that the robin
on her worm-hunt in the dewy grass
had a good chance of outliving me,
as did the worm itself for that matter
if he managed to keep his worm-head down.

It was not always like this.
For decades, I could assume
that I would be around longer
than the squirrel dashing up a tree
or the nightly raccoons in the garbage,
longer than the barred owl on a branch,
the ibis, the chicken, and the horse,

longer than four deer in a clearing
and every creature in the zoo
except the elephant and the tortoise,
whose cages I would hurry past.
It was just then in my calculations
that the cat padded noiselessly into the room,
and it seemed reasonable,

given her bright eyes and glossy coat,
to picture her at my funeral,
dressed all in black, as usual,
which would nicely set off her red collar,
some of the mourners might pause in their grieving to notice,
as she found a place next to a labradoodle
in a section of the church reserved for their kind.

Billy Collins, Whale Day (Random House, 2020)

Holy Ghost

The congregation sang off key.
The priest was rambling.
The paint was peeling in the Sacristy.

A wayward pigeon, trapped in the church,
flew wildly around for a while and then
flew toward a stained glass window,

but it didn’t look like reality.

The ushers yawned, the dollar bills
drifted lazily out of the collection baskets
and a child in the front row began to cry.

Suddenly, the pigeon flew down low,
swooping over the heads of the faithful
like the Holy ghost descending at Pentecost.

Everyone took it to be a sign,
Everyone wants so badly to believe.
You can survive anything if you know
that someone is looking out for you,

but the sky outside the stained glass window,
doesn’t it look like home?

 

June Robertson Beisch, Fatherless Women (Cape Cod Literary Press, 2004)

Wondrous

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk

turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit

the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading

to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs

and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing

at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,

how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried

seventeen times to record the words She died alone

without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying

for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —

wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice

ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,

the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

Sarah Freligh, How to Love the World slowdownshow.org December 5, 2022 

Thirteen Below

 

It's thirteen below on my morning walk.
The snow is rock, the brook is a brick.
Everything crackles. The air itself is brittle.

Yet chickadees and nuthatches work the oaks
in their bare feet, on their tiny ankles.
Life prevails, sustained by a mystery within.

There are seeds that sprout after thousands of years.
Pine cones that open only after forest fires.
Survivors of child abuse who turn out lovely.

There is some force of life in you
that can't be put out, that is—what's the word?—
Eternal.

Shelter that spark. Give thanks.
Layer up if you have to. But trust it.
It will keep you. It will keep you.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net February 6, 2023

Why I'm a Terrible Bed and Breakfast Patron

I'm always afraid I'll break the antiques,
and frankly, I don't really care for them,
one chair as good as another to me—
as long as it accommodates my butt.
I don't like innkeeper small talk, refuse
to pet the resident dog or cat, not caring
how old the house is, or who owned it
before the current owners, or where
the drapes came from or how authentically
the grounds have been restored to former
glory. Reluctant to leave a cheery message
in the guest book—isn't the fact I stayed here
enough? —I know the owners want ooohing
and aahing from me, curiosity, expressions
of awe about floral patterns and chifforobes.
I'm sorry. I can't do it. I don't care about
who slept here a hundred years ago, or twenty
years ago, or last night. I don't care how
aged the trees are out front, what flowers,
freshly cut, reside in these vases one of my
clumsy elbows might send skidding to parquet
floors. I want to go home, where the chairs
don't match, the lawn's got stumps from sawing
down trees of no historical significance,
and the carpets came from the discount place
down the highway. I want to go home
where hands that only I know will cook
my breakfast, will caress my lips and face
to welcome me home, back to my own bed.

 

Allison Joseph, Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021)

What She Taught Me

She taught me linking verbs, predicate nouns,
long division, have a Kleenex ready, an apple
a day. She taught me three-quarter time, Greenwich

Mean Time. She taught me do re mi, Mexicali Rose,
Rose, Rose, my Rose of San Antone. She taught me
Peas Peas Peas Peas, Eating Goober Peas.
She taught me that a peanut is a goober pea

in certain parts of the world, that it is fine
for things to be different in different parts
of the world, no two goobers alike in their

dry red skins, their pock-marked pods,
that there are latitudes and longitudes we have
never seen, that she had seen some part,
and so would I, that I need not

forego either the swings or baseball, that spelling
is on Friday and it is OK to learn more
than one list, including the hard list; it is not

showing off—it is using what you have.
That using what you have will not please
everybody, that marrying a man of a different stripe

is not a popular thing in a small town in the fifties,
and divorcing and coming home with a child
is even worse, and that you
get up every morning anyway,
and do your work.

 

Marjorie Saiser, Lost in Seward County (The Backwaters Press, 2006)

Letter Home

I love you forever
my father's letter tells her
for forty-nine pages,
from the troopship crossing the Atlantic
before they'd ever heard of Anzio.

He misses her, the letter says,
counting out days of boredom, seasickness,
and changing weather,
poker games played for matches
when cash and cigarettes ran out,
a Red Cross package—soap,
cards, a mystery book he traded away
for The Rubaiyyat a bunkmate didn't want.
He stood night watch and thought
of her. Don't forget the payment
for insurance, he says.

My mother waits at home with me,
waits for the letter he writes day by day
moving farther across the ravenous ocean.
She will get it in three months and
her fingers will smooth the Army stationery
to suede.

He will come home, stand
beside her in the photograph, leaning
on crutches, holding
me against the rough wool
of his jacket. He will sit
alone and listen to Aïda

and they will pick up their
interrupted lives. Years later,
she will show her grandchildren
a yellow envelope with
forty-nine wilted pages telling her

of shimmering sequins on the water,
the moonlight catching sudden phosphorescence,
the churned wake that stretched a silver trail.

 

Ellen Steinbaum, Container Gardening (Custom Words, 2008)

Regret

nothing. Not those years
when you were a single mother,
bologna casserole, and not enough
money for heat. Or the years before,
the ones spent trying to please a man
who couldn't be happy, no matter how
hard you tried to replicate his mother's recipes --
the marinara wasn't sweet enough, the lasagna
didn't have enough layers.
Don't regret the years that went up
in smoke, the glamour of the lit match,
the first drag, the curls that rose
to decorate the ceiling. Or the years
as a waitress, the customers who stiffed
you on tips, which were quarters
and nickles back then, every thin dime
counted. Instead, remember your friends,
those hours on the telephone, the artery
of the long black cord, a river of voice.
Don't tell me that broken places
make you stronger, and I won't mention
silver linings. Sometimes, there are scars.

Barbara Crooker, Some Glad Morning: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

My God, It's Full of Stars (excerpt)

 

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Tracy K. Smith (U. S. Poet Laureate, 2017-2019), Life on Mars: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011)