I went outside to sing a song to the thunder
as the thunder sang through the graying sky,
and while I was singing a secret song,
the thunder sang through me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder
as it rumbled through the expanded air
and the thunder entered the rain and the earth
and the thunder entered me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder,
and I was also the thunder.
And the thunder was also the branch and the pond
and the thunder was also me.
I went out to sing a song to the thunder
and there was nothing that was not thunder—
not even the silence, not even the song,
yes, even the longing to sing.
Posts Tagged ‘praise’
Praise Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, praise, song, thunder on June 19, 2025| 2 Comments »
After All This Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, natural world, praise on February 19, 2025| 4 Comments »
my heart still leaps up
for red rock cliffs
that rise from the river,
still thrills at the way
spruce trees grow
(how do they do it?)
out of near vertical walls,
their evergreen branches
bearing the silver
weight of snow.
The older I get,
the greater my wonder.
The older I get,
the more grateful I am
to rise into morning.
The older I get,
the more I want
to offer my breath
in praise of what is beautiful,
resilient and strong.
The turmoil is all around us,
and yet there is so much
that finds a way
not just to survive,
but to shine.
Nocturnal Hyperhidrosis
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged biology, body, menopause, praise, sweat on September 24, 2024| 15 Comments »
I do not love it, the way I fall asleep cold
only to wake in a flush of heat.
Do not love the soaking, the drenching
the damp, then the clammy.
Not once in those small dark hours
have I thought to praise the eccrine glands,
the aprocine glands that secrete the sweat,
so much sweat, the sweat that makes me
shove down the covers and seek
a dry towel to lie on. The cool
night air never quite cool enough.
I don’t love it, the way the warmth
steals me from dreams and returns me
to the demands of body, a body
that’s changing, that’s aging,
a body with an exquisitely sensitive
hypothalamus that worries my body’s too warm.
How quick I am to complain instead of praise.
How hard to remember in these hot and sodden
hours that I admire the wisdom of the body.
Let me now remember I’m a being made of water,
a pond of a woman returning herself to the air.
I am at the mercy of evaporation.
How natural it is, though I do not love it,
this teacher in what comes next.
This is how I practice how
to disappear.
Amen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, gratefulness, holy, paradox, praise, sonnet on July 17, 2024| 8 Comments »
When I forget that the whole world
is holy, even the tiny dark bugs
that slip through window screens
and flock and stick to kitchen lights,
even the charred black remains of forest,
even the river as it floods bright red,
even when my cheeks are tear-stained
and my body tightens with fear,
that is when a kind letter from a stranger
arrives in the mail, or the rabbit will stand
on his back legs to nibble on mint,
or the meadow will blaze with the day’s
last slant of sunlight and my heart opens
so wide that inside the fear rises praise.
Talking with Andrea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aliveness, friendship, grace, language, praise on March 5, 2024| 12 Comments »
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne Lamott
With every cell, I listened
to her familiar voice,
her thoughtful silences,
her precision with verbs,
and though we spoke
of showerheads and
grocery shopping,
elections, underbellies and
standing beneath the moon,
we spoke only of grace, every
sentence somehow stitched
with the most stripped-down
kind of praise, the kind
that doesn’t sparkle,
doesn’t sing, doesn’t
shimmy, doesn’t offer
sweet perfume, the kind
of praise that is so naked,
so plain, so bare
there is nothing at all
between us and the
sheer magnificent truth
that we are here.
I long to name such aliveness,
at once composed
and uncontainable,
but it slips my attempts—
it’s like trying to fit a dress
on a sunbeam.
But I felt it, how
as we spoke I went
from being stone
to being sky. Oh glory,
with my everything,
I felt it.
Another Reason to Marvel
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged color, flower, praise, tulip, universe, wonder on May 6, 2023| 6 Comments »
The average color of the universe
is not blue, as they thought, but beige—
or so they say after studying
two hundred thousand galaxies—
a fact that makes me stand longer today
beside this tulip as it shamelessly splays
its statistically unlikely yellow and red,
a living manual for possibility—
in all of deep space,
the chance to show up in this garden.
Dark Praise
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, dark, praise on December 4, 2022| 16 Comments »
In each of us thrives an inner world
that does not love the light.
An inner world of womb and breath,
the most essential dark
where blood moves and lungs expand,
where neurons fire and cells divide,
where the heart pulses and muscles build,
where all words form, where all thoughts nest,
the secret world of humanness—
the dark we are, the dark we need,
this secret dark we cannot see.
For all its wounds, its rest,
its miraculous repair,
I praise this living dark
we carry everywhere.
Three Unlikelihoods
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged haikuling, praise on March 26, 2022| 6 Comments »
crushed by rusted weight
stalled by my own brokenness—
still this urge to praise
*
despite cosmic odds
that tend toward vacuum and void,
this pale flower, these buds
*
even in cold darkness
hear the growing rush of snowmelt—
somewhere it is warm
Concurrent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, nature, praise, snow, wound on December 12, 2020| Leave a Comment »
On a morning
when the snow
falls and drapes
everything in shine,
it is not that I don’t
feel the wounds—
raw and throbbing—
it’s just that it’s
so beautiful,
this tender world,
that I want
to praise it
forever.
The Snow People, Three Days Later
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged praise, snow, snowmen on November 30, 2020| 2 Comments »
Their hats are cockamamie.
One has lost its carrot nose.
Stone buttons and eyes
have long since succumbed
to gravity. But there is
something yet dignified
about the snow people in the yard,
their knobby stick arms raised
as if, in their declining state,
there’s still so much to praise.
Rather to Praise What Is Still, But
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ferocity, praise, self awareness, wind on November 18, 2020| 2 Comments »
Today when the wind
wrests branches from trees,
cartwheels the watering can
snatches my peace,
I search in me
for a way to praise it,
praise a force strong enough
to rip trees from the earth,
push a ship cross the sea,
and shred what I think I know.
There is in me
a vehement storm
that I have tamed
for fifty years.
Is it any wonder
the wind makes me nervous—
not that I don’t know
how to relate to it,
but oh, because
I do.
The Real Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged angel, despair, praise on November 11, 2020| 4 Comments »
Just as I threw my arms up in despair,
it was as if two angels
swooped in beneath them
and held them in place,
kept my arms raised high
so that anyone walking by
might have thought I was praising
the day, praising the air,
praising the clean blue sky,
kept my arms raised until I, too,
was fooled into thinking
I am here to honor
the immeasurable blue,
here to open, to feel the heart
beat wild inside the chest.
Long ago the angels left,
still I am here, hands raised.
*
*
ha! Friends, I just noticed that an anagram for despair is praised.
Morning After
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, miracle, praise on November 8, 2020| 6 Comments »
Again the chance to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea,
the same image in the same mirror,
which today is startlingly not the same.
Again the chance to find the miracle
in the leaves that fall, the miracle
in the morning sun, the miracle
in the willows beside the pond.
Again, the chance to fall in love
with the same sky, the same field,
the same dirt, the same broken world.
Again, the chance to show up
with these same tired arms
and put them to work,
the same work as yesterday,
which is to learn to lift up,
to heal, to carry, to build,
to be in the world, to praise
the same room, the same floor,
the same view, the same tea.
Stubborn Praise
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged futility, praise on February 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Praise the futility of song.
—Ruth Schwartz, Versions of Ghalib: Ghazal 1,
And so today I praise
the mango that molders,
how sweet it is the moment just before
it is gone. I praise the shovel
for its valiant attempt
to make a clearing
even as snow continues
to fall. Praise the fire,
though it always goes out
when left untended.
Praise how easily I forget the lessons
I learned yesterday,
how this allows me to learn them again.
Praise the body that rises
and runs, though it knows
it will tire and ache. Praise
the innocent clock
which only does what it
was made to do. And praise
this longing to praise—
how it has never built
a single house nor fed a mouth
nor loaded a train,
but oh, the joy,
the aliveness in praising.
Gratitude List with Eyes Continuously Closing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, praise on December 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Easy today to praise the snow
a sparkling settled on all the world,
and easy to praise the oranges
that arrived bringing sunshine
from far away.
Easy to praise the sky as it clears
and easy to praise the wind
as it blows the storm away.
Less easy to praise the moment
between night and dawn
when I would rather be sleeping
than praising.
Less easy to praise the song
that insists on replaying
inside my head.
Less easy still to praise
the sorrow, though
its roots are in great love.
But bless the poem
for offering the chance
to discover praise.
And bless the praise,
for showing up despite
sorrow, despite fear.
Praise the longing
to praise, may it ever
insist on itself, like
grasses that poke
through the snow in the field,
like the sunshine
inside the clementine,
like a poem past midnight
that refuses to let me sleep.
Especially When It Seems Impossible
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, news, poem, poetry, praise on November 14, 2019| 5 Comments »
Try to praise the mutilated world
—Adam Zagajewski
The cratered earth
and the blood stained shirts
and the men with guns
and the hate sharp words
and the sour rooms
that never see sun
and the rashes, the cancers
the blackened lungs
and still, there are paths
in Ohio woods
where upended trees
show elaborate roots
and the water seeps
in the ancient gorge,
and dead leaves fuel
whole dominions of soil
and though beauty
can be hard to reconcile,
worse to ignore it,
worse to look away,
worse in this mutilated world
to pretend we don’t have
ten thousand times ten thousand
reasons to praise.
Unlikely Love Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged drought, poem, poetry, praise, summer, water on July 4, 2018| 8 Comments »
Praise the summer, with its
endless drought. How you’d rather
revile it, change it, pray
for the world to be another way.
Praise the sky, relentlessly clear,
and the dry field that crunches
beneath your feet.
You dream of green, dream
of laughing in the rain, dream
of puddles and the thin river
rising. But praise the scarcity,
how it teaches you what
you would rather not know—
how fragile the balance,
how every drop matters,
how lucky it is
to grow.
One Sincerity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, praise on March 22, 2016| 3 Comments »
Three Questions and Two Mysteries the Day After the Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, poem, poetry, praise, solstice on December 23, 2014| 5 Comments »
is it lighter?
I can’t tell—that’s the way
light is sometimes
*
remind me again,
what are we circling? and what
is it circling us?
*
not bell, not mirror
not sigh, not kiss, not morning,
not moon, not kiss, but
*
is it possible
that I might praise
everything
*
oh yes, I remember,
be a fool—that is what
the wise man said
In Case I Forget to Say It Enough
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratitude, poem, poetry, praise, spring on May 30, 2014| 6 Comments »
Thank you for this day made
of wind and rain and sun and the scent
of old-fashioned lilacs. Thank you
for the pond and the slippery tadpole
and the wild iris that opened beside the pond
last week, so pale, so nearly purple,
their stems already flagged and bent.
Thank you for the yellow morels hiding in the field grass,
the ones we can only see when we are already
on our knees. And thank you for the humming
that rises out of the morning as if mornings
are simply reasons to hum. What a gift,
this being alive, this chance to encounter the world.
What a gift, this being a witness to spring—
spring in everything. Spring in the way
that we greet each other. Spring in the way the golden eagle
takes to the thermals and spirals up to where
we can barely see the great span of its wings.
Spring in the words we have known
since our births. Like glory. Like celebrate.
like flowering. What is it in us that longs to unfurl,
to expand, to open up and leap out—
something feral, unnamable, something
so fierce it can push through the crust of the soil,
something so vulnerable it can freeze and overnight
disappear. Thank you for this return to exactly
where we are, this greening, this bright roar
of the river rising, this swooping
of swallows, this leafing of lettuce,
this now, this yes, this here.