For your birthday, Johannes,
I listened to your first piano concerto,
my heart trembling like a tuning fork
as the ivory keys and nylon strings
conversed about tenebrous grief and loss.
No one hissed in the audience
the way they did when your concerto
debuted. In fact, in my kitchen,
I sighed. I gasped. I thanked you
for the turbulence. What a gift when our sorrow
meets a sister sorrow so beautiful
we forget our own story, our own name,
and we tender what’s left
of our aching hearts to the blooming dark
that even now opens around us, inside us.
Posts Tagged ‘darkness’
For Brahms on His Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brahms, communion, connection, darkness, music on May 8, 2021| 2 Comments »
Why I Stay Up Late
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, mystery, night on December 17, 2020| 2 Comments »
So gently the darkness
curls around the world,
first dusky, then dim,
then lushly black—
so generous, the way
it thickly spreads
the softest of songs
until silence silks
the empty streets
and velvets the vacant rooms—
even this riotous heart
inclines toward quietude
and whatever part of me
that knows something yawns
and the part of me
who falls in love
with mystery
leans more easily
into the ever-unknown
and I meet the starry
grand embrace,
speck that I am,
and marvel
at my insignificance,
marvel at how enormous
it is, this openness,
this gratitude.
One Devotion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, friendship, light, solstice on December 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »
In Times of Great Darkness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, love, sun on July 30, 2020| 4 Comments »
I want to do for you
what the sun does for me—
coax you to come
outside, to breathe in
the golden air.
I want to enter you
and warm you,
fill you with brilliance,
make your muscles melt,
make your mind shush.
I want to prepare for you
luminous paths
that span across deep space,
thaw any part of you
that feels frozen,
find any cracks
and slip shine into them.
Your shadow, I want to intensify it
so you might better know
your own shape.
I want to encourage you
to open, wider, wider,
want to teach you
to write your name
in light.
Find this poem published in the amazing ONE ART POETRY
One Communion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, darkness, poem, poetry on July 13, 2019| Leave a Comment »
One Long Relationship
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, poem, poetry, practice, shadow on June 25, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Amongst the Nasturtiums
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, garden, poem, poetry, possibility, seeds on June 2, 2019| Leave a Comment »
There are darknesses in me,
places I would disregard.
Is it any wonder every year
I plant thousands of tiny seeds
and then wander the garden,
rooting for each as overnightly
they put up rows of tiny leaves.
How easily I forget what is possible.
Sumatra
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged coffee, darkness, poem, poetry, sumatra on January 18, 2019| 2 Comments »
I want to serve you Sumatra,
the wild, mossy, mushroomy
dark of it. I want to serve you
the muted black song in a white cup,
so you can, if you listen closely,
hear the birds of Southeast Asia
with their foreign calls,
hear the farmer as he hums
while he picks the coffee cherry,
as he removes its dark red skin.
I want to serve you the scent of moss,
so strong you find yourself laying in it,
staring up at the sky through
the canopy, laying there for hours
forgetting anything else to do.
Will you find there, too,
the hint of old leather, a favorite
belt, a favorite shoe, something
familiar to slip into? Dark in the cup,
dark like midnight, dark like two a.m., dark
like the silence that finds the world then.
Dark in the cup, like fathomless space
where a small voice whispers, stay awake.
And there, in the cup, the gift of a place
where we have never been, but
together, perhaps, we could sip the Sumatra
and visit again and again.
A Mighty Fortress
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, doubt, martin luther, poem, poetry, song, teaching on January 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I am afraid of the darkness and the hole in it.
—Martin Luther, “Luther”
And when Martin Luther was struck with plague
in 1527, he refused to leave the city, though he trembled,
though he burned. He felt it was the devil’s assault
sent to reduce him with despair. And reduced, he was.
There is darkness so great we lose all sense of direction,
forget even which way is in. There is darkness
so great that even the holes in the darkness are terrible,
cannot be seen as light. And in that terrible August,
the Reformer argued with God. And all that terrible August,
Luther trusted God’s promises. And he told himself,
Pray. Read. Sing. And the darkness endured.
Sometimes, Luther found, there are darknesses
so great we forget how to sing ourselves. Sometimes,
the only way through darkness, through doubt,
is to teach other people to sing.
The Power Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book of the dead, candle, darkness, light, poem, poetry, power, solstice on December 22, 2018| Leave a Comment »
and so we rise in darkness
and let our bodies move
without the blare of light.
The house is still and we
are somehow changed
by stillness, changed
by dark. As if we’ve
grown pads in our feet.
As if we are learning
a new silent language
with our limbs, a language
more graceful, more awake.
We find candles. Find
matches. Let the tiny lights
find us. For a thousand years
in Egypt, they wrote
and rewrote The Book
of Emerging Forth into the Light,
a series of writings we somehow came
to call The Book of the Dead.
All the spells were written
to help the dead person journey
through hostile forces
into the afterlife.
And this morning, we
are our only obstacles.
Still, the candles
are a bit like spells,
guiding us with their brilliant ink
toward dawn. There
are no warnings, no judgements,
no naming of evil spirits.
Only this new language
to learn with its syntax
of carbon, it etymologies
of shadow, its phonemes
of coming light.