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Posts Tagged ‘blame’

Going Deeper Into the Mystery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 23, 2023| 18 Comments »




I don’t know why I did not see
my son’s choice to take his life as a failure.
Not as his failure. Not as mine.
Not the failure of the world.
Not the failure of his friends.
It’s not as if I’m a stranger to failure—
I who can endlessly beat myself up
just for failing to remember to return a call.
I don’t know why I did not need to blame.
Don’t know why I didn’t rail at God.
Why I didn’t contract
into a crumpled ball of shame.
I don’t know what grace stepped in
and turned my heart again and again
toward compassion, toward humanness.
Don’t know why it only occurred to me
to love him. To be gentle with myself.
I don’t know why the world
met my broken heart with such generosity,
obliterating any walls of failure
before I could even fashion the bricks.
I don’t know how it works,
this mystery of acceptance,
but it saved me,
never trying to rewrite the story,
asking nothing of me except
that I let myself be led through every moment
by what I cannot know.

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Unblaming

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on February 10, 2022| 13 Comments »




It’s not that the northern flicker
is trying to harm the tree—
though it’s drilled hundreds of holes
and the trunk appears to have been hit
with hundreds of bullets
aimed in straight horizontal lines.
The holes are a sign that already
the tree was in distress. It is dying.
Its needles turning to rust.
I notice how I might like to blame
the bird. The bird is not to blame.
I might like to blame the bugs—
but they are doing their invertebrate
work, doing what larvae do.
Is their life a problem? Is my life
a problem? What else might I learn
from this dying tree?
This feasting bird? This grieving me?

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After the Fact

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 18, 2014| 3 Comments »

Sitting in this well
I dug myself,
I have enough time
to notice how
I managed to put
the shovel
in your hand

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To an Old Tune

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 21, 2013| 1 Comment »

The wind is cruel
and the heat is cruel
and the drought is pitiless.

It goes on this way.
These are no reasons
to hurt each other.

But we do.
Even the weeds
are blanched and brittle,

the stems dry as pencils,
and it is not yet
the last day of spring.

The fathers go on with their
blaspheming.
The winter was cruel

and the cold was cruel
and the dark was merciless,
it bound us.

Always something
to blame. We could say
the scent of even

a few drops of rain
is generous. We could say
here is my hand.

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