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23
Nov
2018
This poem when my friend Arlene Erickson, hearing about what ministers have been taught in most seminaries since the 1950s, demanded, “Why haven’t we ordinary people been told any of this stuff?” Something about the content led me to put it together in lines vaguely resembling the discipline of iambic pentameter.
“Behold,” he said, “thy path unto salvation.”
“What path?” I asked, “for all that I can see
are thickets of incomprehension; thorns
that reach to snare unwary travellers,
quicksand salivating for a sucker,
roots that rise to trip my thoughts; and tigers
burning bright, crouched to leap with tooth
and claw upon my slightest flaw.
Categories: Poetry
Tags: Traditional theology, progressive theology
20
Oct
Like many of the Psalms of lament in the Bible, this poem combines disillusionment and hope. Rather than the psalm format, though, I have chosen to locate it in the pre-Jewish myths of Zoroastrianism.
Ahura Mazda kneels in the sand
Patiently building a castle.
Grain by grain it rises.
Towers of trust.
Gates of welcome.
Living spaces lit with laughter.
Banquet halls full of sharing.
Ahriman knows
that a single stomp
can reduce the castle to rubble.
Tags: Ahura Mazda, Ahriman, good, evil
8
I have never been able to meditate the way some others do. Either I fall asleep, or my mind races. So I wrote about it.
Silence is a pool, deep and green.
I sink into its welcoming womb.
I empty my mind
thinking of nothing
nothing at all
but nothing abhors a vacuum....
Tags: silence, words, meditate
15
Sep
It’s easy to say what I don’t believe in anymore – an all-knowing grandfather God who sits on a cloud somewhere up there, out there, distant but keeping an eye on everything, delivering rewards and punishments,, and upsetting things here on earth with what we call “acts of God.” But then people ask me, “So what kind of God do you believe in?” And I find prose can’t do it; poetry at least comes closer.
Faces talk around a table
knees warm around a campfire
voices sing in a circle
hands clasp in the darkness
and in between, among, around them
hovers a shining....
Tags: God, shining, presence
27
Aug
Two matched verses, connecting two natural events.
The waterfall
clings to the edge of an abyss
with its fingernails....
An old man
clings to the edge of an abyss....
Tags: death, waterfall, mortality