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Shorelines
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Sometimes
I get to the ocean
Some of you live close by
I could be envious
But I get there
Now and then
It seems to be important
That I do so
It’s not the shoreline in the photograph
I don’t know where that is
But it will do
Any such will do
To remind us
Of where might be our origins
Or our destinations
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Or the real thing
Better
To walk by when it’s early
To think about
Origins and destinations
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C L Couch
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Photo by Zac Harris on Unsplash
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Ephemeral
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A loose hair
A tress, in fact
Something for keeping
As Victorians
And other nineteenth-century
People
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In a box
A remembrance of youth
Or younger days
Or the other day
When the lock was snipped
And tied with ribbon
And I remember you
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C L Couch
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Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash
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Unrequired Beauty
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I drove by
What might have been
An accidental field
Of flowers
No fine edges
No uniform establishment
To speak of
If it had been planted
That was a while ago
Perennials, I imagine
Every year the patch returns
Of blue and purple
Rising
From brown earth
Like holidays
Like celebration
Slowly
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C L Couch
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Uva, Russia
Photo by Daniel Spase on Unsplash
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Sorries
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Maybe there is
Nothing more
Sometimes
Except to say we’re sorry
We’ll do better
Then do better while
Moving on
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C L Couch
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Photo by Andrew Johnson on Unsplash
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(I made up “sorries.” Sorry.)
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Slip-Sliding Petition
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God, I’m tired
Not tired of life
But from lack of sleep
Dreams
That wear me out
So that I’ve lived a day already
Then try to rise
Into waking,
Real agendas
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This is a prayer
Maybe I could ask for something
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I can’t think of anything else
I’ve drifted off
Into Saturday
Or something like
Is Saturday a prayer?
Amen
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C L Couch
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Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash
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Close Call
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Danger, Will
Heatstroke air today
Both hot and humid
You’d swear we were
Sitting, rocking, reclining
On a porch
In a Southern family drama
Spanning time,
Hope, and cynicism
Sipped by lemonade
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Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this
But once I asked a Southerner
How Southerners
Endured all the close heat
There
I thought maybe home remedies
Or some adaptation over generations
Here’s what I was told:
Air-conditioning
Sigh
No saga
Only appliances
Or a central system
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C L Couch
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First-edition dust jacket cover of As I Lay Dying (1930) by the American author William Faulkner.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91865318
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Each One an Apocalypse
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I look up to hills
From the valley
It’s not that the rescue
Has to come from there
Though there are climactic moments when
Over the ridges
Everyone needed
And everything
Appears
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It’s that wherever from wherever
God is there
And it is God who rescues
Who swoops down
To carry us from battle
Takes us to water
Moving just enough
For a hand to fill
From which to drink,
Clean water played
Over wounds
We are better than we’ve felt for days
We are lifted up again
And taken to a home
Whose dimensions have been guessed at
But whose simplicity
In majesty
Is unknown ‘til we’re there
Where living’s perfect
And we are told
To stay
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Each has an Armageddon,
An apocalypse
The unprevaricated spirit
Manifest
With mortality and eternity
On either side
And through and through
Some have called trinity
But is the nature of the Lord
Relational
And relational with everything
Forever
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C L Couch
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Stone Soup
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I don’t know what to say today
I want you to have a good day
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And for a while
To know good days
And what to do when days are bad
Beyond the dreaming we all do
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So that it’s
What we know to do with what we have
Sometimes that’s hard
And hard to believe we have
I’m poor
I know
Too close to the legacy
Of art and artists
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But I know good people
Am learning to ask
And not gauge heaven by response
Or lack thereof
But to keep trying
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Also allowing expectation
We live
We are entitled to live
I don’t know about evil people
I know so few
You are entitled, too, I suppose
I am not God
And cannot judge as God
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But the many, many, many
Of us who are not evil, not pure good
A mix, you know–
Choose a complementary color
We are colors
We color the world
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And are deserving
You deserve
A good day and another
A whole bunch like bananas
Or corn kernels on the cob
Or other things so many colors
(as I’ve said)
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Anyway,
A wish is not a horse
Or an electric car
And, drat, we have to try
The curse of Adam, some would say
Eve is cursed as well
But curses are not endings
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“We have to make our own way,”
I just heard,
Which is true
And there’s so much more
There’s you
There’s me
And any me or you who happens
To be close to you or me
In distance
Actual
Or relative
(and there’s cyber-),
Which is to say
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A nearness
(actual or relative)
To help make life
One bowl of stone soup
At a time
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C L Couch
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Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Statue of a monk and stone soup (sopa da pedra) in Almeirim, Portugal
By Adriao – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7645719
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Ex-Temporaneous
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It’s a dark day
Not enough for a
Ritual outside
And there’s rain
The sun tries
To come through
In patches
Dark hours nonetheless
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That might be spent
At midnight
In the loft,
A vigil
And an offering
Prayer life in the dark
Ages behind that
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Maybe a candle
Of the kind
That does not curse the darkness
But slices through it
If in, well, a fuzzy way
Batteries included
Diffuse Light and shadow
Diffuse
With unscripted words
Everything
Partnering
For the message
For the words
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C L Couch
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Photo by Zoran Kokanovic on Unsplash
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