Once we sang

On December 9, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Originally posted on the CenterQuest website, I wanted to share it here with you as well. That said, do come and visit us at CenterQuest and we’ll have tea or coffee with cigars…whatever.

Once we sang the blustery tunes

of a people bloated on happy promises.

Now, we wait, the words long forgotten

of songs happier still but too faint

to make any difference.

Once we told tales of kings and giants,

maidens and madmen, serpents and swords

walls that crumbled and glories won.

Now, we inhale the night stars of a brittle,

unfamiliar sky into lungs long dry,

heaving for the breath of Heaven.

Once we sang in dulcet tones

with brothers strong, and sisters proud

the songs, full-throated of Yahweh’s arm,

God’s nurturing wings of holy enchantment.

Now, entombed in raspy voices, we sing,

unpracticed in liberating sounds.

We have lost more than a note or two,

suspended as we are

between the music of here and there,

once and again,

Gehenna and Gabriel,

ranting and ruach.

Once we sang a single song.

Now, too many disparate notes vie

for heart and hearth and the demands of presence,

too dim to matter, too far to see, too good to hope for.

Joseph’s bones still cry out from Egypt,

the one with onions, olives and overflowing fullnesses,

not the one the skinny prophets told us to avoid.

Broken reeds too weak to hold up heads

too bored, too forgotten to feel shame.

Even that would be better than

these furrowed grey skies, frowning in apathetic non-wonder.

Lately, we’ve heard rumors of a man

and his pregnant mistress.

Some girl from who knows where

who talks with angels.

Picture found here

Tonight

On December 7, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic6 Comments

Tonight, a tired world slumps, dusty-shouldered,

living large in a tapioca dream, puréed and puerile.

Tonight, the moon decides our fate but blows,

instead, a kiss of light outward to the squinting stars.

Tonight, there sit angry men, rye and ribald

as coffee grounds in the wine, telling cold stories.

Tonight, the light has scurried down the wall

to tease her cache of frozen friends, weeping silently.

Tonight, in the destitution of morbidity,

a son refuses comfort, a daughter, embrace.

Tonight, a mother’s touch unoffered, renders

a mind, once hopeful, to break with yearning.

Tonight, a once great man’s manhood hangs

in the balance of his choice of self-destruction.

Tonight, a people sleep restlessly, awake

to nothing new, asleep to all that’s old.

Tonight, when clocks tick forward, marching

like soldiers, the seconds grasp for more of less.

Tonight, a humble priest, lips now entombed,

trembles in happy disbelief with news of eternity.

Luke 1:5-20

scattered in ashes of light

On November 23, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

there you were scattered in ashes of light

outside of time’s ballooning source

the triadic perfection of unanimous singular gaze

eloping with butterflies light on the sill

and I am loving your loving our loving

there are no more songs fit to sing

where you lay dreaming your hair unyielding

to the moon held at bay too dim for your eyes

a cool and stut stuttering night bares her dark breasts

and draws herself up to tuck in the spindly stars

who point their bony fingers toward my love

still scattered in ashes of light

Picture this

This Holy Skin

On November 15, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic4 Comments

This is a piece originally posted on my innerwoven blog on August 28th of last year. I thought I’d post it here, too. You know, for fun…

We stand and crane our necks

reaching for heaven’s bright smile,

upon shoulders of brown and moving green,

and in the act forget ourselves as one and there and good.

Made from unmade to make again,

these arms outstretched with fingers hoping

to touch the air and the unseen,

we hope for less than our skin suggests.

And yet, in this, there is no shame

since we ourselves are of the dust – rooted,

embranched and gnarled but numinous and whimsical

as the clouds and rain.

To escape from this is not as good

as other fingers poised to touch,

to show what we weren’t looking for…

ourselves, God’s fingerprints smudged

on the pane of humanity,

in the humanity of our pain-

on us.

Having sung with the choir – an evening examen

On November 14, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic4 Comments

Having sung with the choir, this evening’s venture

brings light to the night and a dark covering of

powdered stillness descending, descending still

upon these battered brows. Hear, O hear

the silver notes, sliding out from cleaving tongues

pressed up against our cheeks, the very cheeks

now flushed and warm with the post-song glow of

happy hearts. O Dancing One, how lightly you move,

alight and glide where clumsy old oafs yet banished in

the wooden feet of sin are forced but to watch.

But watch we will until, our laces loose,

we cast off iron shoes, and at last

our feet fall in time with yours.

Tonight, our songs have burrowed into

heads prepared for pillows,

hearts prepared for love,

eyes prepared for sleep,

souls prepared for eternity,

and voices prepared to sing once more the songs

that wonder.

Photo found here

I-You-Holy Ground

On November 9, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic2 Comments

I am the dusty ground, low and dry

thirsty for the imprint of holy feet.

Despoil with radiant prints, this virgin ground.

___

You are the rain, falling deftly

upon my brown soil. Now is left

your footprint on this ground.

___

I am the ashen leaves, curling and broken

awaiting but a whisper. For only then

can I fall on solid ground.

___

You are the soundless wind, howling, still.

You creep up behind me and

exhale me to the ground.

___

I am the snow, disembodied worlds of cold

and chance encounters with hand, or tongue,

eye-lash or palm needing ground.

___

You are the frozen air in which I am held

aloft, drawn slowly down

to meet with others on the frozen ground.

___

I am the waning autumn death

soon to give way to the long silence-when one Voice

becomes the loudest ground.

___

You are the Voice that speaks

heard best in dying, power given for

rising from this shivering ground.

___

I am the distant hours, the midnight passing-

the refusing minutes, trapped in hours,

running from the years of ancient ground.

___

You are the many, and the one, and all time

and nothing and everything from nothing

where time has no ground.

___

I am the weeping, the squalid groaning,

the unrequited miseries of misery’s company

laying crippled and diffused in the ground.

___

You are the end of tears and years, the question

and the answer, the sutured nerve of joy, not suggested

but present, here, on this Holy Ground.

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax, cont.

On November 3, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Music and the arts, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

When, as a boy, I was expected to be cleaning my room, doing homework, weeding the garden or any of a host of other chores, I would more often than not be listening to music in my room. Or, perhaps I’d be teaching myself to sing like Robert Plant or Burton Cummings or Dan Fogelberg. I might have been writing music once I got to Junior High School or touring as a musician by the time I was a senior in High School. Suffice it to say, art, music, poetry – literature in general has shaped my life and provided many hours of delight and avoidance. It’s the mirror into which I’ve learned to see my own face. It’s also the looking glass through which I’ve learned to see others.

Music and poetry can become for all of us an answer to our disheveled hatreds, our worn out prejudices, our tired judgements and our need for a language with which to say, I see you.

Traveling light in serpentine winds

Traveling light in serpentine winds

this haughty craft, held aloft, sequestered

inside hints of journey’s end.

***

Earth’s edges, blunter now but rippled and dented,

provide the places safe to sing

the bawdy songs of youth, sung too soon, before

the second hand is wasted on the whirling clock.

****

Were it anything more than salvageable

solitudes, trapped in their dusty orbs,

such voices might bloat to consume me,

dine on my liver with older words,

rich but thick and unchartered.

*****

So then, forage I shall for colors unmuted,

songs yet without voice, paths full-trod, seen with

eyes withholding nothing but a flute and a scalpel.

One to begin, the other to end

the sharper edges of this catastrophic

beauty – this undulating goodness.

******

I think I’ll take a walk.

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax, cont.

On October 30, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

There is a darker underbelly to our lives we tend to ignore, to our peril. It might be said that we don’t find our lives. Our lives find us. And, when they do, it’s not always with a welcome and a click of the heels. Life can storm upon us, raging and lusting for more than its fair share of pain and woe. What we do with these tumultuous moments ultimately defines who we are becoming. They also birth great words if we let our pencils down from the rafters.

Hear the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:

What we choose to fight is so tiny!

What fights with us is so great!

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need names…

This is the next piece in my foray into meta-poetry.

You hide under the precipice of your own misdeeds,

your miscalculations act as the belt around

the pants of your own shame.

Here, the rains can’t come.

Here, the foes of restraint and full-plumed capacity

can’t find you splayed out, legs spread,

skin available and raw. Here, you can

hide what lawns of leverage have provided

growing spaces for the personal politics of

hatred. But, make no mistake, though the ravished

rumps of these unsuspecting fools as you call them

might be your bitch, love’s poetry

is your garment, a hand to pull away

the guise of the cylindrical. It will give instead –

a horizon.

Poetry: rebuilding the world through the un-wasted beauty of redemptive syntax

On October 25, 2013October 25, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

Dylan Thomas, a favorite poet and writer, says this about words in poetry:

And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing…There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. -as quoted by James Hillman in “The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart” (a must read, by the way).

I bemoan earlier days when poets were the prophets of the people. Words, stories and cultural anecdotes were the food-stuff of our existence, not the quaint, winter-hazed mist on the edges of our choked, windowed lives. They took center stage where the very words themselves were the Homeric epic of small existences writ large through bardic retelling to others thirsty to feel their enjoining on the stalk of shared time.

I begin here a short series of poetry about poetry, words about words; the metalanguage of the language, lost but longing to be refound, non-linear and non-pragmatic, seeking instead to rebuild the world through the unwasted beauty of redemptive syntax. To that end, I give you…

There you lay, face down in a puddle of

old dreams. Your brow, damp from

sweating out doubt-filled promises-

the mantric words of small men, of sullen women

bathing on stolen rooftops of run down tenements.

* * * * *

Goliath has defeated David with small,

pebbled words, slung out quietly across

the distance between them, too far

for slings filled with ancient anger.

Gruff prayers traded for slick threats.

* * * * *

Setesh broods his flustering fare. He sits

at the table of the unmemoried death,

serving up sighs and groans – the language

of lusty crows, too boisterous to still

their cantankerosity; too new and

untested to feed even their open-mouthed young.

* * * * *

Brush off the fog that settles on

your hunger for colored story, embattled songs,

for words floating and submerged under the borders,

planted in places too deep to be found

by spade, knife, wallet or hammer.

Longing letters taste like a lover’s kiss.

Driving school, autumn nights and thoughts on poverty

On October 19, 2013October 21, 2013 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Prayers & Liturgy, Waxing Poetic5 Comments

Poverty never ceases to surprise and disarm. What is truly alarming however is whenever I grow indifferent or worse, apathetic, to its crying dishonor. May I never be unaware or distant and always prepared to enter into the suffering of others. Lord, have mercy.

Don’t let me be found waiting when,

like water on a mirror, I slide

from corner to corner,

unwieldy and unpredictable,

the scab before the fall,

the tears before the pain,

the gain before the loss.

Running toward is always better than

running away when haggard eyes

silently proclaim my complicity in

the hollow halls of ownership.

I need to simmer long in cauldrons