Our own is gone. Here there
is no black, white, rich, poor,
or strong or weak. All are born in
a past statement present fact.

We still wear our grave clothes
but that doesn’t make us corpses.
You have made all stones roll back, and we
are together learning how to be skin
full with all Your fullness,
abiding in all in all
living again

Snow comes
always in anger.
It smothers all contradiction
insists
everyone accept its intrusion.

When it has had its say it
settles back. Leans with
muted satisfaction, brooks no
contradiction.

We are left to drive carefully,
fearful of the way conflict
seems to have faded, still lingers.
Everyone is cautious.
The world may yet reject us.

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
- Ephesians 6:4

——————-

The Hurt Child by Margaret Atwood

The hurt child will bite you.
The hurt child will turn
into a fearsome creature
and bit you where you stand.

The hurt child will grow a skin
over the wound you have given it
- or not given, because the wound
is not a gift, a gift is accepted
freely, and the child had no choice.

It will grow a skin over the wound,
the hoarded wound, the heirloom wound
you have pried out of yourself like a bullet
and implanted in its flesh -
a skin a hide a pelt
a scalded rind,
and sharp fish teeth
like a warped baby’s -
and it will bite you

and you will cry foul
as is your habit
and there will be a fight
because you’ll take the fight out of the box
labelled Fights you keep so carefully stored
against emergencies, and this is one,

and the hurt child will lose the fight
and it will go lurching off
into the suburbs, and it will cause
panic in drugstores and havoc
among the barbecues
and they will say Help help a monster
and it will get into the news

and it will be hunted
with dogs, and it will leave a trail
of hair, fur, scales, and baby teeth, and tears
from where it has been ripped
by broken glass and such

and it will hide in culverts
in toolsheds, under shrubs,
licking its wound, its rage,
the rage you have it
and it will drag itself to the well

the lake the stream the reservoir
because it is thirsty
because it is monstrous
with its raging thirst
which looks like spines all over it

and the dogs and the hunters will find it
and it will stand at bay
and howl about injustices
and it will be torn open
and they will eat its heart

and everyone will cheer,
Thank god that’s over!

And its blood will seep into the water
and you will drink it every day.

-from The Door

—-

With a prayer You fed the hungry,
With a cry You stilled the storm;
With a look You had compassion
On the desperate and forlorn.

With a touch You healed the leper,
With a shout You raised the dead;
With a word expelled the demons,
With a blessing broke the bread.

Love incarnate, love divine,
Captivate this heart of mine
Till all I do speaks of You.

As a sheep before the shearer
You were silent in Your pain;
You endured humiliation
At the hands of those You’d made.
And as hell unleashed its fury
You were lifted on a tree,
Crying ‘Father God, forgive them,
Place their punishment on Me.’

Love incarnate, love divine,
Captivate this heart of mine
Till all I do speaks of You.

I will feed the poor and hungry,
I will stand up for the truth;
I will take my cross and follow
To the corners of the earth.
And I ask that You so fill me
With Your peace, Your power, Your breath,
That I never love my life so much
To shrink from facing death.

Love incarnate, love divine,
Captivate this heart of mine
Till all I do speaks of You.

- Stuart Townsend

I met you in the chasm,
with those eyes that know more
about others than about themselves.

Six months of ignorance
and growing knowledge left us
to shiver side by side
at the way history
refused to remain a memory.
We bore the freeing chains
of the repentance stone.
Again and again.

I met you and
a whorl of language
that was too large for my tongue
formed in my stomach.

There are no ways to distill
what still swirls with wonder inside me
so I
put off the old I knew
and put on the canvas
to bear us, thick as we are
into valleys of beauty.
Cracks, crevices, and all.

We meet in weekends
I crawl with wasted history
into your aching eyes
to rest for months.

I wake behind a cornea,
swim amongst old memories,
to find a pool
of forgiveness only inches deep
but miles wide.

You cry finally, years later,
rivers from my days of sin and sleep.
I fold like raindrops, fall
from your eyes to the floor
and stand to face the burden:
all that love knows is war.

Our meeting was
a composed alchemy -
a change of form preceded
by resounding deliberation;
war completed
by two becoming one nation.

We become harmony in the aftermath
partners in a restoration – transformation -
testing the length and width of our countries
like an archer would test the wind
before loosing an arrow to kill.

We cast ourselves,
two statues from the same pedestal
and learn the solution to division
is not in dividing,
but in a greater union.

Grace and peace,

Benjamin Pontius

Warmth is the valleys between
the ten castles of your fingers
and the carved glacial curve of
your throat, not
in the summer air.

Elsewhere is arctic, desolate
of the sweet flood which covers my skin
when the heat from your lips moves
like a tempest to my cheek.

Smiling, you kiss me.
I recall what I
forget the better inches of, so often;
that we love each other
like cloud and sunset, because
when we’re together
the whole world is more glorious.