May 2022

King for a Day

(x = space)

King for a Day

King for a day

His day

Our day

Faithful king

Sinful king

Silenced before prophecy

The parable of Nathan

We want a king

God gave Saul

Maybe for this next time

God chose a favorite

A paradox

Youth against wisdom

Music versus war

The height of Goliath

(or of Saul)

Against the reach

Of sling and stone

And the power to be favored

C L Couch

in response to a prompt from the Canadian Bible Society for a creative expression of David from the Old Testament (https://biblescanada.com/giveaway)

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

Vintage photo of a soldier during WWII. Photographer: Charles Wilfred Linder

England, UK

May 4, 2022 1

Renovations of Divine Love

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Renovations of Divine Love

She saw creation

In a hazelnut

The way Blake saw the universe

In a grain of sand

And microscopes would render

Microcosms,

Subatomic worlds

As such, the world might be understood

As something to take care of

To have holiness in peelings

While there are leftovers

From the seasons

There is no trash

Each cell revealing plans

For perfection

When all shall be well

We don’t know her name

She had a cell

Part of

The church of Saint Julian

She was God’s prisoner

By devotion

Many came outside her cell

To talk with her

About visions of the world

About someday considerations

Passed into today

To replicate her life,

We need our version

Our version

Of a place

With a cat

Maybe with people going by

Life of a town

A neighborhood

A city block

A farm

We need time without calling it

Time

It is devotion

It is service that is easy

As in receiving love is easy

And honing faith

A pursuit of both

Earthly and ethereal

Delight

C L Couch

Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash

May 3, 2022 2

One Morning, Late

(x = space)

One Morning, Late

Dry life

No humours

Those fluids that fill

The body

No mercurial

Or saturnine

Temperaments

No temperaments at all

I’m not sure what happened

Overnight

Something

That has dessicated everything

A sponge of dreams

The drying-out of nightmares

The medication measured out

And gone away

Over the hours

The pores remain

So that breathing

With the world is possible

A dried-out life

Like the old painting on the wall

Cracks in moving

Brittle breathing

It started on the inside

And meets up with

The magma as it’s cooling

Under Earth

How does it feel?

How do you feel?

It happens everywhere

In the expanding universe

That also ages

Time for

Childhood’s end

For God to lift us to

The next step on the ladder

The next step

On the stairway

Call it providence

Call if evolution

Call it providential evolution

Childhood’s end

Time to rise

To go up

The attic

Of creation waits

When we’re all gathered,

The roof comes off

Our house

C L Couch

Childhood’s End is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke.

Triangulum Galaxy

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

May 2, 2022 0

May Polemics

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May Polemics

The first day of May

Owned by ancients

And Christians,

Soviets

Now socialists

A day entrenched in green

Because in the north

It certainly must

Be spring

An extra day for Joseph

It was a matter of religion

In repression

But doesn’t the dancing

Go back extra ages

Before the cross supplanted?

Well, in some parts

They all go together,

Which might be something

To think about

Except that mainly folk

Simply have the day

Dance out loud

Or in the mind dance

Reason out

Embrace contraries

All the parts

With each other later

If ever

Happy May Day, folks

Of many kinds

And ages

On the field

All sunlit

C L Couch

Photo by Yuliia Tretynychenko on Unsplash

Kyiv, Ukraine

Published 3 hours ago [from 8 a.m. EDT]

note

William Blake is famously (and reasonably) quoted claiming that “without contraries there is no progression.” Peter Elbow, a writing and teaching practitioner and theorist, takes Blake’s understanding of contraries in application and in titling his work Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. Both writers and their works tend to resonate with me.

May 1, 2022 2