Shovel dirt on a crisp day
in your sweatshirt.
Sit to rest and, with a sharp knife,
quarter and core a granny smith.
Peanut butter and honey each bit.
Chew magnificent
and pity the two great tastes
of peanut butter and chocolate
as they trip just shy of delicious.
These bricks, in our hands,
rise up like storms to wreck our plans
on disagreement—to lay up, or pull down?
These mortar joints and tools
break the arms of worker-fools.
For us, there is no harbor in this town.
If bricks could attest,
They’d raise a cairn to our unrest;
This post would tell of work yet to be done.
It can only point the way
back to where we quit the fray.
For us, there is no haven from the sun.
These bricks build choices;
they raise questions without voices.
The answers are chisels on a stone.
Bricks can compromise;
they won’t bruise or get black eyes!
For us, deals are made of flesh and bone.
These bricks will destroy—
rise up like lonely in a boy—
while, ignorant, I try to keep my life.
…we can build…we can rise…
there is time to gain the prize.
For us, the shelter stone is in the strife.
cairn: a marker, often a pile of stones
A revision of my poem previously titled Suffering: A Poem To Joel Osteen.
Joel Osteen, you are a champion.
Even your name is like esteem.
You are reassuring, unable to offend,
and I cannot help but like you.
Yet I wonder,
where do you put pain?
You seem to manage headaches
and American depression,
but what about big suffering,
like that mentioned
in Hebrews five, verse seven?
Are people who obey God always happy
and content? Sinless Jesus
learned obedience
by what he underwent.
Well meant are your admonitions.
You believe in good decisions,
and in Jesus, by whom promises are given.
Don’t forget, as Christians
we confess best intentions
as hankerings to be a mannequin
or a magician.
Listen, one pastor said,
you’ll know you’ve encountered God
when you limp.
We are inexorable. Happiness feels foreign.
Oh, to be sleek like plastic,
to live with faith-expectant…
if only our ragged souls
were not so bent.
Words are power, but we don’t hear them.
Coaxing can’t turn us, we must be caught!
We have a worship problem.
We won’t receive a gift
until our hands are shaking.
Ask the poet, ask Bob Dylan—
behind every beautiful thing
there is persistent aching.
Where are your sick, your sad,
your malcontents?
We read your books
to become smooth and stiff.
Prop us up behind plate glass,
we want to be convinced.
But we must ask ourselves:
do we love the poor;
do we pay attention?
Imagine we visit the slums of Kolkata
with Mother Theresa.
All of us are smiling.
She sees the people.
We look at them.
We stand straight, full of promise.
She is crooked
from leaning into their faces.
We want to help them,
but we’re stuck in our position.
The masses are borne up
by her cracks and creases;
gleaming teeth shame them.
So let’s close our mouths for a season.
You may have built an empire
on your congenial smile,
but what we really need
is to put on desperation.
Do you want us to be like you
or be forgiven?
Idols fall. People get bruised.
But that can help us
to stop encouraging belief
in a god who gives his best
only to those who follow
the rules.
That god is ruthless.
And his face is never at rest.
Between us, on a tabletop of glass,
a working hand becomes a hammer.
A man wants his way.
He won’t take no.
Blood, though not spilled, boils.
Shards ring out and sing
the ways we will not mend—
how the heart, like a fractal,
repeats a pattern of breaks
and splits when magnified.
My heart rages. It pushes blood
along a crooked line of strife
until I heed the rattle-crack
and attend the bang of anger.
The embittered rackets rise until
the broken pieces lay at rest between us.
You (And I) Said...