Places 27: Malice toward None
In 1970, when divorce, PTDS after traumatic violence (intervening to stop an attempted murder), the deaths of my dad and both grandmas and other inexplicable events and significant losses all hit me within eighteen months, I crumbled. At one darkly threatening moment, I feared losing total touch with my mind’s hold on objective reality. I […]
Places 26: Facing the Rain
I couldn’t revise Facing the Rain. It was right the first time. In Places in 2011, it was a reader’s favorite. It’s not made-up. It’s a real poem about me and my Mom. To my mother Once, in the beginning, we stood on the front porch facing into the rain close and warm watching together safe […]
Places 25: Good Morning
Good Morning What? Waking me up before the dawn, expecting me, to praise, to forget myself and sing Your song? No early bird am I. Deprived of rest, shivering in wintry cold wanting warmth and heat to thaw my frigid hands and feet— You say to seek for song? I come up short in weakness […]
Places 24: You Will Know Me
Revisions of You Will Really Know Me Waiting Often I have sought You— pushed aside the lures of night, fought to find Your Glory light. I’d wait with seeking heart until Your Love would find— to realign my weary mind. Today, I’m tired of waiting, encased in aching aging bones, my weary soul waits on, […]
Places 23: Tall Before Me
Note: I had fun with this one. I’m not sure how inspired it is— the content is quite serious but the words came so quickly that I forgot about the “writer” in me who struggles and searches for the perfect word and just enjoyed the flow of verses moving from my head to the paper. One line […]
Places 20: That Day
Was nature still? Or did winds stir? Did leaves whisper or branches rub to sigh? Were there grasses high enough to bend and sway, to worship their Creator upon that Holy Day? What sounds surrounded Him? Did footsteps on the road near-by slow down to plod, trod and tread in quiet fear and dread? Could […]
Places 19: Impaled
Note: Impaled reminds me that over forty years ago, I heard a Middle Eastern man tell how, while still young boy, maybe 12 or 13, he saw Jesus hanging on the cross. He said that he was, in vision, actually taken to Golgotha. While he watched Jesus’ crucifixion, the Lord looked at him. He was instantly […]
Places 18: Silent Witness
Have you ever wondered what Jesus “will” was a on the night He sweat great drops of blood and cried out, “Not my will, but Yours be done?” This reflection and poem is about the olive trees silent witness to Jesus’ agony that night. Did they hear what He was praying about?
Places 17: Gethsemane
In the fun of colored eggs and family and all the beauty of the lilies and the “Hallelujahs” of Easter, I can focus so fully on the joyous triumph of “He is Risen” that the fullness of why Jesus denied Himself and choose His Father’s will—even death on a cross— falls in the background. Revising […]
Places 15: Waiting for Wind
Note: Here are two poems. The 2011 poem describes summer heat. The 2021 version is a work in progress. Inner impressions that surfaced while reading Carl Trueman’s The Life of the Mind slipped in. Trueman says our culture elevates immanence (materialism), unbelief, and the importance of our inner individual feelings and physical desires over external authorities like […]
Places 14: Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope Once I sought and found quiet in a one room cabin on a Southern Indiana farm. It was built from unfinished freshly milled wood and set inside a partly fenced-off glade of tall unmown grass between woods, pasture, a cow corridor and grainfields. The inside was undecorated and sparsely furnished. It was intentionally off […]
Places 13: Cedars
Cloud brushed cedars
gently sway
into the darkening skies.
Birds that crowded
summer skies
