"Rest Easy"

The Journey is an Adventure; I am an Alien: The Touch Test

As you know, I am a blog seeker. When I stumbled upon this blog I had to share the insights of the author with you - especially since Touch is on the UMW Reading Program list this year.

There are some really good ideas here!

The Journey is an Adventure; I am an Alien: The Touch Test: "Are you familiar with 'The Touch Test'? If you are familiar with Rudy or Juanita Rasmus, then the answer is most likely 'yes'. If not, the..."

Child Still?

The grass is always greener
on the other side.
Unfortunately,
green has never been my color,
and crossing that river
feels less worth it with every day. 

I am searching for hills
of purple and gold
under a crystalline sky
of glowing jeweled hues.

I am searching for lands
of eternal diamond suns,
where smiles lack teeth
and eyes never lie.

I am searching for a place
where our turbid waters settle
and smoothly wind their way
to flow among the breathless stars.

Morning Cures Nothing

There is something unimaginably cold
about waking up, swathed only in hard-edged
blue shadows, in the middle of a very long night.
It feels like the destruction of worlds,
the genocide of thought and reason,
and all that remains is to tremble and hope
for the swift arrival of bright-lit morning
(which, inevitably, comes late and grey.)

It is a shiveringly desolate sensation
that seeps into the lungs and stays
for eons and eternities, until you become
so weighed down with dark atmospheres
that it becomes impossible to get up
when morning finally decides to come.

I have stayed in bed for so long now,
I begin to believe I will never rise.

Episcopalian Years

I remember, long years ago, when my mother
would drag me tired-eyed from a warm bed
and ungently stuff me into Sunday’s sundry frills.
We walked the four dull blocks to the church,
her modest heels tip-tapping across the concrete.

We knelt on the hard floor, arching our hands
in mimicry of the vaulted beam-crossed ceiling.
I would sneak glances, squirming'neath iconic eyes,
to see the stiff edges of Mother’s face softened
by the shifting colors from the stained glass,
soothed by the pale pink of Mary's brow
and the white of wing-wrapped hosts.

I was always a little afraid, at those times,
that the smiling crystalline Jesus above us
would smite me down in a rain of holy fire
because I loved her more, kneeling in church,
than at any other place in the entire world--

She no longer looked like herself.

Resiliance

I am burrowing past the bits of spine
and lungflesh to bore a hole
into the core of my limping heart,
where I will huddle around muted limbs
and say,

Hello, heart. Haven’t seen you
since you were tiny and hadn’t learned yet
to beat on your own.

…I guess not much has changed, has it?

Five Stanzas of Trinity

1.
Like every four-year-old
Catholic-Lutheran-Methodist-Baptist-Protestant,
I drank my grapejuice
before the blessing;
Communion.

2.
I can remember
really being baptized.
There are silvered dreams
of the man placing me in,
holding me under,
passing me through,forgetting his words.

3.
My mother searched
for the right church
instead of religion.
It was a race with crosses
as batons, and I
dropped mine entirely.

4.
One pastor was
a bigot, one priest
uninspired,
the reverend an
embezzler. One church
an ugly paint job, two worn 
down and old.

5.
Father was a pagan
who found god his own
unspiritual way. I took all
my best qualities from him;
all my worst, too.