Blackbirds

I am 52 years old, and have spent
truly the better part
of my life out-of-doors
but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward
I saw a flock of blackbirds
rounding a curve I didn’t know was there
and the sound was simply all those wings
just feathers against air, against gravity
and such a beautiful winning
the whole flock taking a long, wide turn
as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

Oh if we lived only in human society
with its cruelty and fear
its apathy and exhaustion
what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
so that when, every now and then, mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we manage to unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

 

Julie Cadwallader-Staub, janicefalls.wordpress.com June 10, 2020

At Table

When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. Luke 24:30

We are taken:
gathered up in God's grace,
belonging not to ourselves now, but God,
taken out of our lives, and made part of something
greater -- infinite, gracious, and unendingly good.

We are blessed:
God's love and delight poured out upon us,
God's mercy filling us,
so no matter what our circumstances
our lives bear grace and the power of healing.

We are broken:
sinful and incomplete, brokenhearted in love,
perfectly weak and flawed,
we are broken open
so the love poured into us may flow out
into the world.

And we are given
to the world,
resurrected, vessels of blessing,
given to love,
bread of life for others.

God, in your mercy
take, bless, break, and give us,
raised, renewed, imbued with your spirit,
full of beauty, love, and courage,
the Body of Christ.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net, April 23, 2020

I Married You

I married you

for all the wrong reasons,

charmed by your

dangerous family history,

by the innocent muscles, bulging

like hidden weapons

under your shirt,

by your naive ties, the colors

of painted scraps of sunset.

 

I was charmed too

by your assumptions

about me: my serenity—

that mirror waiting to be cracked,

my flashy acrobatics with knives

in the kitchen.

How wrong we both were

about each other,

and how happy we have been.

Linda Pastan, Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006) 

I Love You

Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.
It’s all new to this only child.
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day
would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.
Of course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern.
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.
“But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of a volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,
or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges into the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
but enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now,
and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student knows, it really counts.”

Billy Collins, senortao.com March 6, 2020

Long Shot

                   for Rich Strike

I have been the player benched

at tip-off, game by game, watched nets dance

with leather, felt the storm and wrench

of clumsy. I defied it. Made my chance

in cones lined up on pavement. Only

the sun to coach my feet, my hands.

I have been that lonely.

 

I have sought bouquets of crimson roses,

hid beyond the slides and swings at recess,

played in fields, held my princess poses

among the calves. I have worn a dress

and asked a boy to dance, as Sony

speakers belted love. He didn’t say yes.

I have been that lonely.

 

I have drained a three point shot, the one

that glitters memory like waves curl to sand,

felt all of that and more in a man’s hand.

I kicked, slapped, not knowing I had won

everything. When the long shot bites the pony

after he wins the roses, I understand.

I have been that lonely.

 

T. R. Poulson, Poems Respond rattle.com May 15, 2022

How Much Do You Weigh?

 A question asked often by old men or young, friends, strangers

on the road. How much? I didn’t know how to answer. Certainly

 

not a question you’d ask of a woman—not in America where

I’d come from—but common in the village where I lived, deep 

 

in the Land of the Lozi, people of cattle and sand. Zambians 

living twenty miles from Angola. Twenty miles from civil war. 

 

Tins of cheese from the United Nations, vividly marked Not for Sale 

gathered dust in our nearly empty market. Exorbitant price. Unobtainable.

 

When a fat campaigning politician came slick to our village, 

gaunt mothers with emaciated children gathered and pointed, astonished.

 

Admired his weight as if wealth. Look! He can eat and eat, 

more than enough! What to make of a man who is fat? Unimaginable.

 

fantasy to anemic mothers with brittle-boned children, bellies swollen

by hunger, legs weeping with sores. What a relief just to eat not defeated

 

by dry empty fields, crops gone to dust. Such ease to eat and eat

what you please and not stop. How much do you weigh? No longer

 

unseemly, no longer a goad. Compassionate. Tender. Driven by hunger,

rendered by need. A question which reconfigured might just as well ask,

 

do you have enough? Have you eaten today? Will you sleep hungry? 

Tell me. How much do you weigh?

 

Jill Kandell. Rattle #75  May 16, 2022

Kindness

Last week, a nurse pulled a warm blanket
from a magical cave of heated cotton
and lay it on my lap, even wrapping
my feet. She admired my red sandals.
Once, a friend brought me a chicken
she’d roasted and packed with whole lemons.
I ate it with my fingers while it was still warm.
Kindnesses appear, then disappear so quickly
that I forget their brief streaks: they vanish,
while cruelty pearls its durable shell.
Goodness streams like hot water through my hair
and down my skin, and I’m able to live
again with the ache. Love wakens the world.
Kindness is my mother, sending me a yellow dress in the mail
for no reason other than to watch me twirl.

Anya Silver, janicefalls.wordpress.com May 11, 2022