Call The Grieving God, Appearances

These two difficult poems were written within 45 minutes. They are, I think now, two different phases of the same inner movement.

I don't know how to make theology out of it. I don't care because for me this is where heart comes in. I know in my bones that Infinite God grieves. The sadness known to the house finch chick who fell from the nest, the fear and loss of its mother, the regret of the universe at that moment leads to the infinite grief of God. Anything God does in genuine response of His own is and must be infinite. As in the Holy Word, down to the smallest and least of them. When life is unfair, as it so frequently is, God grieves the necessity of that. Because it is necessary. It always has been. Life must prey on life. There is nothing else it can prey on. The prey will always know its own protest. The prey will always Witness. And God perhaps eternally grieves as she sees as a mother does through the prey's own eyes.

Call The Grieving God

The walls are too high.
They go too far left and right.

Storms will come near soon
And wild eyed, we still cast blame.

Call the grieving god to help
The host cross over.

We think we know what happens
When the walls fall.

*********************************

The salmon go home to spawn. It starts there but I was not a fish, not on this day. I was myself feeling the immensity of things, the smallness of me.

I openly declared myself on quest, declared it publicly as part of my return to finish my degree. In 1980 I wrote a Portfolio of prior learning experience to achieve 28 credits and my batchelors degree after a decade out of school. I started over a year earlier. It was 283 pages in the end. Ten pages a credit is about right. It was titled, Metaphysics, A Quest For Wisdom - Psychology, An Exploration Of Mind. Of course to be in the position to write such a thing, well, this was the time of the open declaration of what had been happening in my life since 1966. So I started college in 1963 and graduated in 1981. I did a bunch of living in the middle.

But there are days I don't feel I measure up. I bet I'm not the only one.

Appearances

Me swimming upstream
Feeling the pull against me
But home is this way.

Oh, I am tired, aching.
One more stroke, then another.

But I am farther
(This is how it seems to me)
From home now than then.