Bring forth the night
that, in its wake, I too may wake
to morning light
and blessings, new.
A night with friends
The evening, purple and plush, is tender.
Her breezy suggestions of tales, told late
well, often, and loudly from tables
laden with good friends. The fingerprinted
beer glasses fill with memories, plump with
well worded love, seed the new day
and push just a little harder toward joy.
Glasses emptied, giggles abounding
posture themselves as little brother
to guffawed grins on quivering chins,
twin bearers of gladness and gloom.
For soon the night must absolve
the room of her secrets, and
invite the neighbored goodness back
to places now refreshed in
the exercise of lingering laughter
late and perfectly balanced,
found only among the best of friends.
Of life, love and bagpipes – continued
I reblog part 2 of “of life, love and bagpipes.” Snort, guffaw, chuckle…do what you have to do.
At a Highland Games sometime last summer I was piping for the Highland Dancing portion and wrote some reflections. This is the continuation of that story…
I jump ahead forty years in order to share one of many piping stories accumulated over those years. Since the age of fourteen I have played bagpipes as accompaniment for highland dancing. Typically, a piper or pipers are hired to perform this task, doing so throughout the day trading off dances for breaks from the delightful tedium. Yesterday was one such day.
One walks onto a damp field, humming with the possibilities of the day, newly arrived but yet in infancy. The sun, undecided as to its welcome, insists on playing peek-a-boo through gently swaying trees overhead. The heady, morning air gradually yields to the all too familiar squawks of bagpipers keen to tame the beast before their competition debut two hours hence. Ahead…
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Found in lost time
The periphery is the place
where dreams are most visible.
On the edges, frayed and wrinkled,
my subdivided realities
open wide and spread out
before inquisitors pressed in close
with noses against the dirty glass
of my best kept secrets.
Let’s confirm that hope
spy that joy,
pin down that lie,
open that pain.
If one can make hiccups
in time and place, perhaps
there can be rejoined
the fragile messes,
the intractable chaos,
the static imperfections
with the faux pardon of time.
Drive the head of this nail
of perceptions through
already connected wood
with the hammer of bad choices.
What’s left is just one more nail.
Still, my need for love,
unprovoked and misunderstood,
is best found in lost time.
Of life, love and bagpipes
I’ve spent much of the summer, as is often the case, playing bagpipes for one highland games after another (apparently games are best played at altitude). I’d like to repost a couple pieces written a couple years ago to celebrate this personal delight. Come, join the parade. Bring earplugs.
I am a Highland Bagpipe player or piper in street talk. It is an instrument with which I have had a love-hate relationship for almost forty years now. For the longest time I wondered what might have gone through my parents’ minds when, at eight years of age, I loudly proclaimed my overweening desire to begin lessons immediately. That is, until I mused lately on the fact that both of my sons are rock drummers. I’m sure that bears at least some resemblance.
Perhaps not.
The Great Highland Bagpipe (GHB) as it is called by the musicology muck-a-mucks is an instrument uniquely designed to be heard. A perfect wake-the-dead alarm, they have been used for centuries to alert clans of forthcoming gatherings, oncoming battles and soon coming dignitaries. A piper on a hill is not just a cliché or quaint tourist post card. It does in fact typify much of…
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A journal entry: Friday, July 19th, 2013
These words flow from a pen both weak and hungry. They dump onto paper in an effort to unload excess flotsam from my soul. My pen is also hungry for words other than those that seem only to spill out in self-expression, self-deprecation, self-indictment, self-actualization, self, self, self…blah! There’s so much me that there is precious little room left for anyone else. At times like these I’m left to ponder whether I’d even recognize the harmonious, lilting song of God above the shrill, cacophonous din of my own voice trumpeting its need of something or other.
Instead, let me bring the pen of a ready writer, a writer, ready and poised to praise the One whose words I seek. The Logos – the Ultimate Word – forms the inspiration for my little words. Maybe as I write my words in praise of the Word, my story will begin to take on the shape of the Great Narrator. Let your wise and beautiful words, O Logos, letter my life with beauty, honesty and truth.
The Beginning.
“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”: why I write poetry
“There once was a girl from Nantucket…”
There are as many ways of self-expression as there are people…self-expressing. One can say something in many and varied ways. There, see? Unlike other, non-poetic forms of writing, poetry evokes rather than explains. Now, good prose also can do this. But, somehow, there is an economy of words and focus of emotion in poetry, a kind of escalator narrative that moves us up and down at will, that prose cannot seem to create in as neat and succinct a way. Prose tells the story of our life on paper. Poetry crunches up the paper and then makes sense of the wrinkles. Prose seeks to pull petals off the flower and, in deconstructing it, find it. Poetry imagines the soul of the flower and, in ways both sensory and direct, introduces us. Prose tells us how beautiful the flower is. Poetry tells the flower how beautiful we are. In a real sense, poetry is a flower, a kind of natural face given to the mystery of our being.
Poetry doesn’t take us from A to B. It asks why we even need B in the first place, or at least takes the longer, scenic route. Prose needs readers to engage with its detail and form. Poetry needs but to exist since it is both beauty and the suggestion thereof. It is an invitation not to read but to be read. “If a tree falls in the forest” is a question we ask ourselves. The poet shows how cool a silent tree really is. It is the art of words rather than the science of language. Moreover, the lucidity and dominance of its spatial, nuanced non-rhetoric leaves a big, front door through which those of us thirsty for something other than exactitude and definition may find our Narnia. A good narrative will give us the tale, the wardrobe, the place. Poetry helps us live the tale. Prose ushers us to turkey dinner at Grandma’s house. Poetry ushers us to Grandma whose heart was the crucible of love out of which came our dinner.
I write poetry because, for me, it is prayer. It allows extreme right-brained thinkers like myself to engage with words in more dancelike fashion, treating them more like lovers than telemarketers. I can simply close my eyes and, through the mystery of my subconscious, knit to God’s own being, walk through the veil of here to there without having to explain why or even how I got there. Poetry is perfect for people who can’t figure things out but for whom the things are just as cool unfigured out. Mystery wins every time.
If you had no idea what the hell I just wrote, you’re not quite ready for poetry…just yet.
Photo: www.blog.ted.com
A Wednesday Examen
Glance, and I will escape you.
Look, and I will show you.
Behold, and I will move you.
Observe, and I will educate you.
See, and I will change you.
Changed, you will see me.
A Tuesday Examen
Scattered across lonely seas
dwell the lilies of desire.
Dotted between the balancing
green are other frondish delights
with fingers extended on palms
upraised, deterred by nothing
but the gentle floating away of
newly made ripples, starting
from a center and pushing out
to the edges where the shoreline
awaits to receive what waves may come.
They have made big what once
was small, white-capped wonder
from still and never-sunken petals.
The end exhumes the beginning
but little beginnings brought
such proud endings, humbled
by endless sandy sleep. Here
God is waiting.
God is watching.
God is cooking fish.
Lily: www.parentdish.com
Crashing waves: www.123rf.com
A Monday Examen
There is no way to distinguish
the place where the radiance of evening
touches the face of God.
Just fingers of grace-soaked light
long, drawling and sure,
that pull at the last, dark places
and weed them out of the heated ground
to die quietly in the burning
breath of love, and then
to live again.
innerwoven 