A Language Stilled, Be Still

The extinction of the Bo language means
that a unique part of human society
is now just a memory.
–The BBC

And with her final breath before sleep
was the last thought of an angelic
tongue stilled? Have the uninterpreted

messages of glossolalia been warning
us, we the disinterested? Babel’s tower
tumbled and we do not understand,

but in its stead we may have envisioned
and pressed with soft ears attention
to mysteries, unheard, yet

not silenced, only shrouded in cushioned
chambers. In the quiet, lonely, yet laugh
permeated hut she awaited communion

among her ancient messengers, giving
voice to their final three decades of attendance
to the world with, to us, peculiar intonations.

This Crazed World

A homiletical writing based on February 1, 2010 lectionary texts (2 Samuel 15:13-14, 30; 16:5-13, Psalm 3:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, Mark 5:1-20)

Are we not, to some extent, a little leery of people in their right mind, those who seemingly understand things, who are calm in the midst of a crazy world? Consider for a moment yourself as one of the legion masses, scrambling around the marketplace, seeking to acquire anything and everything you can for yourself, always trying break yourself “free” from the bonds that would have you just chill out, practice silence, breathe deeply, smile for the simple joy that is a kind thought. Now imagine a person coming among you and the legion; peaceful, patient, responsible, the embodiment of healing and sanity. “Get out of here!” the people would cry. “Do not torment us with your joy, grace, peace, and understanding, your clarity of thought and intentions of good will!”

We are so used to craziness that we have figured out how to filter it out. For example, we might be quick to be impressed with David’s response to the Benjaminite Shimei, telling his men to not put a finger on him, and we’d say, “Look, this guy get’s it. A man after God’s own heart.” But let us not filter out the end of the story told in the second chapter of First Kings. David’s last words on his death bed to the new King Solomon are a contrived way around his apparent promise to not put Shimei to the sword for cursing him, for having once rightly called him to account as a murderer. David, with his last breath before resting with his ancestors (imagine Marlon Brando speaking to a young Al Pacino): “You must not let him go unpunished. You are a wise man and will know how to deal with him. Send down his gray head in blood to the grave.” Yes, even King David was one among the legion.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone is demon possessed or out of their minds. But I am concerned that it seems so difficult for the world to heed the Word of Truth, to allow Jesus to heal them, to clothe them with righteousness. I’m concerned that so often my attitude toward the call of the gospel is one of resistance, of confusion. Like Paul, I do not do what I want, and too often I do what I hate.

Today we prayed with the psalmist that the Lord would rise up and save us. The psalmist was apparently concerned about the threat of crazed enemies on all sides. Let us consider how the Lord has answered that plea for salvation. The Word became flesh and dwelled among us, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, giving hope to the poor, driving out demons, teaching in word and deed the way of love, commanding us to love our enemies and pray for those who threaten us. The masses responded with cruel crucifixion. But on the third Christ overcame the grave, eventually to ascend into heaven. God has sent to the world the Spirit of truth and love, to give us words when words fail, to empower us to follow the way of Christ.

Let us, the Body of Christ, the possession of the One who came among the legion masses, who came in right mind in a world running amuck, seek to listen to God’s call. Let us witness the man possessed by Legion, now sitting clothed and in his right mind and be amazed. Let us be knowledgeable enough to see through the smooth talk of leaders like King David, to, with humility, be willing to call them to account even as we recognize our own faults.

At the Lord ’s Table we ingest paradoxical sanity. The brokenness of Christ’s body and the poured out blood of Jesus make us whole and cause to well up within our bellies streams of living water. May the Lord rise up and save us, cast out all impurities, when we offer in thanksgiving gifts of bread and wine, and ultimately the gift of our whole selves.

A Few Older Poems

I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. Here are a few older poems.

Plain Talk (to children) [2006]

Speak plainly.
Someone’s going to tell them
the way it is.
It doesn’t look so good.
Nothing surprises us anymore
so let them speak.
Give them good words,
words with hand and feet,
holy lips to kiss.
Speak plainly,
for the children know
what you are saying.

now/here [2004]

you find yourself
moving to the now/here
as if it were something
that needs to be found
it is discovered
as nowhere
despite the search
which may give substance
it is transcendent
simply is
then isn’t
but then you
realize the isn’t isn’t
because it is again
you’ve been taken up
and brought back
down
and have remained
all along

Cul-de-Sac [2004]

Mom tells me about go Joe.
Knowing is half the war.
Bo and his brother,
Mormons,
had cap guns.
I hid my guns by unsnapping Legos.
Never had the best machinegun mouth sound.
Peter Hessleman played a better dead soldier;
You had to shake him to find out the truth.
We grew up on a battleground cul-de-sac
surrounded by desert.
It said goodbye to me with rain.
Bullets and bombs in the mind of a child
holding plastic heroes of destruction,
loving it and not knowing why.

Thank God for Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey [2005]

Let me fix me a drink before i drive,
a sip of bourbon to straighten me up on my windin’ way.
Pardon my french monarch,
she the only one who tells me what I want to hear.
Nothin’.
She tell it to me so lovely.
Lick my ear with a moisture only one of them French could lick.
Melts my heart and mind and ain’t no body gonna stop her.
This body here goin’ to the grave.
Heart done stopped, years go.
My self, see, been split.
I can’t put me back together,
I’m three or four, rather.
Y’all cut me in halves
like limes.
I want to kill ya.
Made me live in yer crescent moon shithole.
My body, mind, spirit, soul
I’m done split,
gone to pissin’ the night.
She gettin’ my life right.
She melt me back together,
she lick my flesh tongue and mind the same time.
Y’all only cut me,
altogether ignore me,
so you the ignorant
and you the one bent.
My snakin’ road got straight
like my drink.
She don’t need no pardon,
but y’all need to look yourself,
see your mind and eye and arm work.
They the same.
They really is.

Pompeii Blue [2005]

In mine or your living room or somewhere else
with Pompeii blue walls with Hermes
let’s spend time together.
Spend time together until we choke
and suffocate upon each other’s presence
so we might die and live again and live some more
and find our way until we exit through the door.
For you and I were meant to sit here on couches
and stand up and walk out and come back again
and live again and read some more
and look into each others’ eyes
for the first time and second time and last time
until the time when we don’t know it will happen again
and then, you my friend,
me your friend,
we friends as friends are suppose to be,
not simply people we call “friend,”
but people we die for towards the end,
in the end it will come
and you and I will sit here
in yours or mine living room or somewhere else
with Pompeii blue walls and angles.
And the angles will not be present
or felt present
or seen with their wings and eyes on the back of their heads
because my eyes are in your eyes and yours in mine
we simply glide together and find ourselves in one another.
You are other.
And the other becomes me and you and you and me
and we’re so confused,
our words continue to repeat themselves,
go back/forth,
and not know what’s really happening.
And we keep speaking and talking
and somehow we come out of body,
find ourselves totally embodied to begin with
because this body,
our bodies,
are where they are
and not somewhere else.
Not somewhere else to be found roaming around
in some unobtainable space which is nonexistent,
simply made up
in order to not have to pay attention
to the fact that it really is right where we are.
Not in some celestial star
or in some bar with smoke and booze
and women with far too high heeled shoes. (Well, maybe.)
No, it’s in this living room, yours or mine or somewhere else, my friend
with HAVÉ and Pompeii blue walls
and angles welcoming and being welcomed.*

*This was more a transcribed poem than composed, “freestyle,” if you will. When I was driving from E TN to IN I was reflecting upon the wall seen in the picture above. It is something I saw while in Pompeii, Italy. Essentially, the people there, before they were engulfed by a cloud of ash from Mt. Vesuvius, believed that any visitor may be a god and thus they made their guest rooms the best room in the house. The wall seen here is from a guest room in Pompeii. The beauty of its blue captured my imagination from the first time I saw it. Long story short, I was impressed with the Pompeian conception of hospitality and while I was driving I reached for a voice recorder I kept with me at the time and spoke out this poem almost exactly as it is seen in its present form. Please feel welcome.

See, This is Why

So often a person says
something and with quiet restraint,
surely painted on my expression
and lifted shoulders, I do not

say, See, and this is why.
For once I did say such
all too often. And then
silence and unwanted solitude.

Though sometime later
someone might tell me,
I see now, that was why.
But more often, after

silence, with another we
might say in some strange
and light unison, See,
this too is why and it was

even something different
than what we both first saw.

The Lost Line

American lives are on the line:
Read – We’re going to have to
go overseas and, with some mustered regret,
kill some more non-Americans.

So much for the cost of freedom.

Whoever takes up his life
will loose it,
but whoever gives up his life
for my sake
will find it.

A real time game of lost and found
and, it appears, many are not winning.
Freedom for protection.

Quilt, Green and Crowned

A quilt will be coming,
green and warm,
I am told; stitched
by the hand now

stiffened, imagined as good
and appropriate
by the mind now pursued
by a growth whose swell

has not yet, swallowed speech.
Will not. Pleasure was in her voice
as she spoke on the phone
from a hospital bed, telling

me to expect the pattern
of Cross and Crown.
It is to be the last patchwork
by one Martha, who,

like one other Martha,
worked and kept in shape
and in place houses
and a home and table

and children and husband.
And now, Mother and Grandmother
Martha, open the home
of your heart once again, for

though now afflicted,
now is a moment for blessed
humility, frank reflection,
paces toward the good

and beautiful, and then
the letting go,
that distinguished act
of courage and modest will.

All should be so allowed
to choose such a commission,
and thus be thankful
for the coming stillness,

the calm, prefaced by the stark
and revealing silence. Rest,
when open, after your coronation
of pieced fabric, a presence

in preparation for a worthy
departure, an enthroned
and enthroning farewell.

General Session

Underneath the harsh light
of yellowed florescent,
a paneless room,
no outward glimpses allowed;

You must only look in,
and look at no one,
and speak with no one,
and concern yourself with no one,
be looked at by no one.

Papered lives, offenses on our roads:
one man, five times taken to the side, drunk;
one man with a taillight out;
one man to return in a month.

A general session.

An assistant to the district attorney
stretching the tail of his shirt translucent blue,
sentenced by empty energy
to the full array someday of poor health.

No reading in this room,
no space for articulation,
no shared vision but that of the tiled floor,
paneled ceiling, judge’s bench.

Were the face of the deputies burdened,
judicious, calloused or confused?
Aged jarheads upon necks stuffed into collars,
stern, surveying the solemn and unrepentant,
the burdened, the bored, the amused,
the confused, impatient.

Happening upon the honored place,
sight of a prisoner, green and grayed suit,
a pale, young lemur with shadowing whiskers
upon his upper lip. Shackled,
he disappears himself behind a flanneled cubicle,
worried. No one to talk with.

Everyone else must exit the back door,
unless escorted to the side,
unless retreating to a windowed office.

Falling Leaves

All coiled up by a story
of one Adam and one Eve
seen one way, a story to you

of people like leaves,
lost greens to brittle browns
floating to the ground

to be piled up, thrown away
or set afire. You cay say,
“God loves you,” so you

don’t have to. Much easier
to see others as leaves, falling,
while you’re the tree, cutting

them off. Many trees are
broken by strong winds.
And the fallen leaves were

beautiful reds and yellows
while dying so that other
leaves could, after the winter,

arise and live. Not one way
to read.

Behemoth and Leviathan, Good Ol’ Boys Raising Cain

Leviathan belches. He’s been eating
too much. The industry nurses
his gluttonous hunger.

And Behemoth farts. Smokestacks
in our green house. The beast smells.
A whiff of Kingsport’s chemicals, Nairobi’s

Kibera, impostor nutrients for soil poison
and quick yields, and plastics and cleaning
agents. They’re extracting a thick

chaos from beneath the dry sands,
an oily chaos for an anointing
of annihilation. God is letting it happen.

But God shouldn’t. And the gods
are making it happen. Mammon,
Leviathan’s master, peddling

the goods and desires. Now, I must
slow my cursing. (I’m a part of it.)
Slow like the rise of tides,

the submerging of islands. No man is.
Man and woman and woman and man
are conjuring Behemoth,

the dragon’s froth on crests of waves,
blackened rainbows rippling
on the seas’ faces, and dead fish

come belly up. The contradictions
of progress whirl quickly to the blue
heaven firmament. And Leviathan

belches, Behemoth farts, we yawn
and scratch a passing itch, and
chaos sprays and burns.

And God should stop it. And we
should stop it. And we should
still and quiet ourselves, praying

as the chaos continues, for God
stills our chaos so we will create
it no more.

God’s Green Fingers

Would it be so wrong to think of God,
again, in physical terms,
like of old?

Today, a little girl
with still new steps pranced with a
confident unassured gait back and forth

between a concrete sidewalk and
grass. And though those hired to
try to tame Earth’s green growth

to appropriate a contrived commercial
scape had obviously recently been there,
the freedom in the child drew her

to God’s small, manicured, fingers,
even as her cultured mother tried to keep her
on a fabricated foundation.

But God’s hands were still reaching,
even if they would leave a reminding
itch upon her knees should she have

fallen, even though the green grass
drew the girl into the sun, its burning
light, threatening to blemish,

as her worried mother feared, her
smooth, pale skin, plump cheeks,
with the heat of red life.