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Category Archives: poetry
We came here after Columbine
Let’s paint them
red, white, and blue
have some clergyman
compose a pledge
teach our children to recite it
hand on heart Continue reading
Posted in current events, gun violence, poetry
Tagged 2nd amendment, school shootings
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Do not give your heart to the ashes
The landscape within which we live is littered with sin, from the scars we inflict upon the earth on up through the twisted veins of hearts that would burn down a church built in the image of God’s mercy. And it is impossible to stand here in an attitude of repentance tonight without acknowledging the complicity of our common life in the deaths of 17 students, children, at a high school in Florida this afternoon. Our participation in systems of sin, as its priests and as its victims, is as inevitable as the ice of winter. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, poetry, sermon, story
Tagged Frank X. Walker, gun violence, mercy, R.S. Thomas, repentance, school shootings, wildfires
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The Feast of the Presentation
Simeon has been dismissed. Anna shed her widow’s weeds, went dancing with the turtle doves, snowing feathers; all that remains is dust and the rubble of a memory, the echo of a prayer, and a child, caught by his woven … Continue reading
Posted in holy days, poetry, prayer, story
Tagged Jerusalem, Nunc Dimittis, Simeon and Anna, The Feast of the Presentation
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Holy innocents
Their wisdom was not wanted by the powers that be, in case it would unseat their certainty of their own anointed state. Warned in a dream, they went home another way, pursued by rumours of mothers kneeling in the ashes of … Continue reading
Posted in current events, holy days, poetry, story
Tagged Epiphany, Holy Innocents, Martin Luther King Jr, three kings
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Consider hibernation
a sabbatical of sorts… Continue reading
Wordless
Wordless came the Word of God; not silent, as the night revolved around him snuffling, yawning, suckling, sighing, crying out the love of God, wordless, gazing into the eternity between one body and the next.
Posted in advent meditations, holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer
Tagged Christmas, John 1:1-18, Word of God
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Psalm for a commute
My God, my God, the traffic is backed up and there is no exit in sight. I am hemmed in all around by hostility; horns sound their derision and air brakes vent their anger. Evil eyes blink yellow and red: … Continue reading
Posted in poetry, prayer
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Advent
Dangerous moments in a darkened womb; the unfamiliar arrhythmia of travel, the fresh, tart taste of fear filtered through amniotic fluid, lullaby of strange sirens steering the weary; sunk in your swaying sea, time contracts creation to a singularity still … Continue reading
Posted in advent meditations, current events, poetry, prayer
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Telling
We are not Survivor. They took our bodies down, stripped and swaddled, spiced and laid, restless. We are not Victim, though they nail us to whatever piece of wood they find to hand. We are Resurrection. Bury us deep as … Continue reading
Posted in current events, poetry, story
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Timely: a psalm
Bend my time back to the moment
when You are ever present,
and let it be now. Continue reading
over the water 