Tag Archives: freeverse

The Grey and Green

Posted on by
3

The shorter period of Ordinary Time in winter between Epiphany and Lent is a season which I cannot quite get my head and heart around. It seems both more melancholy and more yearning. Will spring really come or will winter go on? February 2, whether it’s marked as Candlemas or Groundhog Day, speaks to the longing for more light and the end of winter. The reductionism of the religionists who say, that Christian feasts are only the reappropriation of pagan holidays forget that these people didn’t think themselves into living in the world. Rather they lived in the world (the same one in which we live I might add), which called forth the realities of living in that world. Whoever you are, living through late winter in the Northern Hemisphere is hard.

Late winter is when the cold
Colors with the hue of blue,
Slate and grey,
Throughout the day.

And the stark scratch of limb and
Tree’s branch which stretch out like hands,
Stretch from earth
In frozen reach.

Here in our Ordinary
Time, we dress the altar in
The green of
Cedar and pine.

What lies beneath the ice, snow,
What we do not see but know:
Life goes on
When others leave.

And that is hard. Hard and cold
As the frozen earth is old,
Compacted
By Time’s wait.

Joy lies dormant underneath
Awaits, till the cry, Wake! Rise!
Calls forth bloom
And the frozen, flower.

© Randall Edwards 2020.
This poem is for Christ’s church. If it is helpful, please feel free to copy or reprint in church bulletins, read aloud, or repost. I only ask that an attribution be cited to myself (Randall Edwards) and this blog (backwardmutters.com). Thanks.

More

Posted on by
1

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The making and creating continue;
The abundance seems prodigal,
Why wild flowers on an unseen alpine meadow,
Or the bizarre creatures of the Laurentian abyss
That go unseen for no one to pic,
Monetize, harvest, or like?
Who sees? Who receives the delight
And claps their hands?
Waving, cheering, More! More! More! Again! Again!
Why all this waste?

And yet there is more.

And you who in the pressing smallness
Of either meagerness or the famine of misfortune,
You, make–
Put this and that together, join and
Connect the pieces and parts
Into something new,
Saying something more about
The yearly yearning for fullness.

The Maker sees and claps.
And cries More! More! More!
Like children running circles in the sanctuary
Thrilled with the space and eager to fill it all,
Eager with chasing one another.

© Randall Edwards 2019.
This sonnet is for Christ’s church. If it is helpful, please feel free to copy or reprint in church bulletins, read aloud, or repost. I only ask that an attribution be cited to myself (Randall Edwards) and this blog (backwardmutters.com). Thanks.
Artwork: Original linoleum print by Randall Edwards.

Heavy Emptiness

Posted on by
1

The heavy emptiness:
One’s lightness of being,
The loss of substance and purpose,
The clarity of vision for the day and week.

And then one’s lost
Which is an eternity of loss or at least
An indefinite hole in the future.
The empty arms that held and hugged
Now holding this urn–
This heavy square,
This dense packet of person.

Then the tears I feel and cry,
The regret of so much
Lost.
Lost words and ones too hastily spoken,
Unsaid, or unrepented.
The sadness over how much
And how easily I resented
The trouble and time.

© Randall Edwards 2019.

Brought Near

Posted on by
Reply

This poem is based on Ephesians 2:11-22 and is a part of a series entitled Grow Up. Specifically, I was inspired by the inscription which was posted at the temple in Jerusalem and marked the boundary between the the court of the Gentiles and the inner courts in which ceremonially clean Jews were invited. The inscriptions were warnings not to enter under pain of death.

The translation of the inscription on the stone pictured reads, “Let no foreigner enter within the parapet and the partition which surrounds the Temple precincts. Anyone caught [violating] will be held accountable for his ensuing death.” This screen, parapet, or dividing wall is what the Apostle Paul likely visualized when he wrote in Ephesians 2:14, “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility….” And it was the accusation that Paul himself had violated this ordinance by taking several of those who had traveled with him from Asia and Greece to bring the relief offering to Jerusalem. (See Acts 21 and 22) that ultimately landed him in the chains in which he now writes the Ephesian church from Rome.

Remember what it was like to be
Known for what you weren’t? For your
Shortcomings? For what you tried but
Couldn’t do? Remember what you
Wanted but were denied? Or how you failed when
Trying? Let alone that, no matter how hard you
Tried, it didn’t matter because you were
Born that way? Being separated, shewed away as an
Unclean dog, alienated and a
Stranger and counted among the
Hapless, hopeless, godless, lost?
Do you remember?

And then?
But.
That blessed
Interruption which a child
Learns soon after learning to say, ‘No’.
‘But Mom…but Dad..but why…but when?’
“But now
You have been brought near”
Not through your
Excellence or having secured your own
Access BUT, by the passive activity of the
Reception of a gracious gift. You are
Brought near. Though you had been far off,
Peace has been secured by a
Blood-bond and payment;
And the hostility
Drained from the veins of wrath as a butchered
Lamb prepared for the spit.

No more walls,
No more sore warnings,
Nor taking your life in your own hands.
For you have been taken in hand,
And those scarred by nails.
That hand joins yours and theirs and ours
Each of us smeared with the same blood
And ears pierced with the same awe-full word
And eyes lifted, to the full-bore, blazing
Sunrise smile of blessing.
To stand in the presence of THE ONE whose mere
Presence pacifies, stills, and quiets. Makes no-matter
The questions which burned before.
Hand in hand, by that hand, knowing as we are
Known, wanted as we have always been, and
Reborn.

© Randall Edwards 2019
This poem is for Christ’s church. If it is helpful, please feel free to copy or reprint in church bulletins, read aloud, or repost. I only ask that an attribution be cited to myself, Randall Edwards, and this blog (backwardmutters.com). Thanks.
Picture: Istanbul Archaeology Museums [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D

Spring

Posted on by
2

The wind blows, and
The trees wave their arms,
Winking their leaves
And smile, shimmering spring green.

The wind whisps and roars
With a thousand voices
Hailing the bright, blithe sun
Who slings earthward warmth and light.

The clouds above roll
And boil over and through
And yellow clouds
Catch the wind and swarm on wings.

I too am moved,
My watery eyes swell,
Waving my arms, a flush,
I breathe deep, catch, pause,
And sneeze.

© Randall Edwards 2018.
Photograph Attribution: By Dartmouth College Electron Microscope Facility [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
photograph: Pollen from a variety of common plants: sunflower (Helianthus annuus), morning glory Ipomoea purpurea, hollyhock (Sildalcea malviflora), lily (Lilium auratum), primrose (Oenothera fruticosa) and castor bean (Ricinus communis). The image is magnified some x500, so the bean shaped grain in the bottom left corner is about 50 μm long.