I have been writing poetry over much of my now rather long lifespan, but haven’t published much of it. (The main exception would be my book of conversations with God called Lovesongs and Reproaches.) This Lent, I plan to put some of the others online and invite you to make use of them for Lenten meditation.

2/14

ASH WEDNESDAY 

The cross of ashes drawn above my eyes

I faintly sense as it sheds its fragile dust. 

Yet, the mind has an eye to see it. And if wise,

can claim its own mortality— as it must.

The limits of our breath, the certainty

of death—let the image here impressed set free

the soul from arrogance and selfish strife,

and give us back the wonder of this life. 

But which of us is wise except by fits

and starts? We, soon enough, forget it all,

complain again of stingy gifts

and find new fault with God—until we’re called

back to this altar, here again to learn

that dust we are and to dust we shall return.

2/15/2024

JESUS WITH THE WILD BEASTS

And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan: and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him. Mark 1:12-23

I. How crowded the desert was when you matched wits 

with Satan—the Spirit as impresario

for the Conflict of the Ages, the wild beasts

to cheer you on, angels to come and go,

bringing wet towels to cool you. The fight was pitched

between your innocence and the Devil’s guile—

all eagerness to share some helpful tricks

just to smooth your way—well worth your time!

Would you remember that the choice of tool

must always shape the end, that violence

or bribery can never lure a fool

into the mystery of faithfulness?

And nowhere to be heard a human voice.

Did you fear that Satan would prove to be our choice?

2/16/2024

II. In the desert you made yourself at home with beast

and angel as of old in Eden. There

the lion and gazelle, greatest and least,

made forty days of truce and took a share

in your distress, your struggle to decide

whether the prize was worth the cost: to confront

the powers with their wrongs and then to die

without a fight, the quarry helpless in the hunt.

Angels and beasts could only watch and wait 

and give companionship. When you come back,

your people—those who love you and who hate—

will try to turn you off your chosen track.

The thing you seek for them—what you’ll have won—

they won’t begin to understand until it’s done. 

2/17/2024

A LITANY FOR LENT

For fear by which we justify our hate,

for pride that feeds our foolish arrogance,

for selfishness that sees our world’s sad state

as if it were mere inconvenience,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

For gluttony on mere consumption bent,

for lust that shatters faith with friend and neighbor,

for sloth that renders us indifferent,

for envy that resents another’s favor,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

Teach us, instead, to trust your love, to hold

our neighbor’s life in honor as our own.

Teach us and strengthen us to live by grace

to love and foster what your love has sown.

to live in hope and therefore to be bold

until we come to meet you face to face.

Forgive and renew us, God of all compassion.

2/18/2024

SONNETS ON CREATION 

Genesis 1

. . . the earth was without form and void. . .

Isness could have been nothingness. Or worse,

could have been something so entrained, entrapped,

encrystaled that it could not move—some terse

reduction of all to one, cooped up and strapped

into itself, invulnerable and devoid

of movement—body, mind, or soul. It would

have been stillborn—a lifeless, changeless void,

free of decay, like stone that mimics wood

perhaps but never was a tree. Such cold

perfection as might gratify the eye

of a collector, with no one to be bold

and fault the work as cold and dry.

Isness could have been nothingness, did One not say,

“Let there be light and dark. Let night follow day.”

2/19/2024

Let there be a firmament. . . .

Having made room for change, the One stepped back—

that One to whom all time is Now, all place

is Here, that One who nothing knows of lack,

sensing the whole in even the barest trace—

stepped back so that eternity could play

its raptures out in time, infinity

resolve itself in chords, the rhythms of day

and dusk, of night and dawn, in passing, free

truth into narrative, break the unbroken

Now into past and present and what’s yet 

to come. For only so can life be spoken,

what’s dimly sensed be caught in speech’s net.

And yet eternity holds firm to form the heaven,

the enduring loom on which our saving tales are woven. 

2/20/2024

Let the earth bring forth grass. . . . 

Grass—not at once. Before the grass the earth.

Before the earth the rocks. Then wind and rain 

eroding, age on age, to bring to birth 

fine particles and rush them down amain

into the sea, where they turn into—stone!

For earth, the One needs helpers in the toil,

creative atomies that on their own

can turn the barren sediment to soil.

Then from such beings, vanishingly small,

evolves the whole astounding panoply

of earthly creatures: plant and animal, 

life’s outward branching, leafing, burgeoning tree.

The microbes, made by God, have made the world we see.

A lesser God would work alone from jealousy.

2/20/2024

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Great lights and lesser ones—we thought we knew

how to tell each from each. We watched the sun

pass north and south, leading the seasons through

the turning year. We watched the waning moon

pause for a moment and then wax again,

pulling the tides behind. Pillars we made

to mark their progress; we began to spin

our ordered web of calendars. And, splayed

across the firmament, the lesser lights

we marshaled into orderly arrays:

a track for sun and moon; for sailors’ nights

markers of south and north; signs for our ways.

And now we know our sun is but a lesser star.

Only the One saw great and lesser as they are. 

2/21/2024

Let the waters bring forth abundantly. . . and God saw that it was good.

We have long thought you made the earth for us,

but we were wrong. Your purpose was delight,

yours and the world’s. The hippopotamus

lives to enjoy the pastures of the night.

Leviathan you made for the sport of it.

The breaching whale has reason enough for life.

The oriole at its nest, the small bushtit

scrambling through branches, the melodious strife

of mockingbirds, the kestrels’ soar and stoop,

the secrecy of owls, the effortless

float of condors, the waddle of a troop 

of ducklings—every piece of it you bless.

Your purpose was delight, yours and the world’s; your grace

to share delight with even an ungrateful race.

2/24/2024

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And on the seventh day God . . . rested . . . from all his work which he had made.

The labors of six days combine to form

a world, fashioned of water, air, and earth,

of light and dark, of calm succeeding storm,

a world whose inner fires bring to birth,

new mountain steeps that rain will carry down

to form new plains, while ponderous continents

creep across the globe and seas now drown

and now withdraw, a world whose elements

have sprung to life in vast variety.

And then, the story tells us, you decreed

that labor makes of rest necessity.

What finitude requires you concede.

For us, rest leads to work and work leads back to rest.

For you they are the same thing—love. And that is best.

2/25/2024

EDEN (Genesis 2-3)

God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

This was your pleasure garden, was it not?

You planted it with spreading trees for shade,

divided it with water channels, made

a cooling refuge here when the sun grew hot.

You fashioned open glades of limber grass,

rich pools and marshes, austere rockeries;

and nothing there could ever fail to please

the viewer’s eye and heart and mind. And last

you brought the earthling there, still fresh, new-formed

of clay and breath, and offered him the land

to tend and treasure—left it in his hand

that heart, through hand’s engagement, might be warmed.

In Adam, you hoped to give the earth a friend.

To him you gave a world to love and tend. 

2/26/2024

. . . and took the rib and closed up flesh in its place.

Why not have made two earthlings from the start?

Was it so much more difficult than one?

Already master of the potter’s art,

you could have made many, laid them in the sun,

breathed life into them with a single breath.

Did you not know that a single one, alone,

no friend but you, would find it a kind of death?

Ah no! For how, indeed, could that be known

that had not yet been felt? But you could see

the sorrow that fastened on his soul.

And you lanced the wound of singularity,

making one two to make of two a whole—

each with a heart to turn toward the other,

each one the beloved and the lover.

2/27/2024

. . . the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil

The Tree of Life grew in the garden’s heart,

more flourishing in flower and fruit and leaf

than even the highest mastery of art

can represent. And those who stood beneath

its shade could breathe from it a calm, unspoken

certainty of God. A boundless grace

made one God’s friend, a calm delight was token

of a blessed soul that never left this place.

But we chose otherwise and ate from the Tree

not of stability but Knowledge, not

the perfected life but stumbling search—to see

both good and evil, tangled in their knot.

Thus God may have some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.