Lauda
All the things I should have said
All the times I should have said
Thank you
I love you
I’m sorry
Let me help
Yes, it’s me
Yes, it’s maudlin
Though it might be useful
I might be
Maybe I should wear motley like a fool
A reminder to step out of the folds
Of an otherwise fixed and unkind people
To say instead
I’m fragile
And I make mistakes
But I’m not done
To say instead
To act instead
Let me try
C L Couch
Wikimedia Commons
Barn-Raising
It’s a day, a process
As long as many are involved
It stands a chance
But that’s the deal: we must
Come together to make it
Happen
And afterward we have a barn
And each other
All in company
Maybe the U.N. should go into this
Raising barns in needful places
And then making delegates
Raise barns in troubled places
No doubt some of the work would be bombed
And other work burned down
We have to allow
For that without ever
Approving
C L Couch
Catskill Animal Sanctuary Needs Your Help to Complete New Barn …
The Circle Will
Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so
All of Christian theology in a
Capsule, so I’m told
And I can believe it
Little ones to him belong
Who said he will not suffer fools
It was not Jesus
He welcomed the small, the foolish,
And the outcast
I take great comfort from his
Company
And so might you
They are weak, but he is strong
Is there strength in doubt
In cynical insight—if
So, then I might qualify for
Divine companionship
To marvel in the one who
Walks beside me
Yes, Jesus loves me
Yes, Jesus loves me
One more time, and the spell is cast
It becomes official
He has pledged some kind of
Fidelity to me
Because an invocation counts
So much so we give it once a week
That, like the bath on Saturday,
We take it, needing one or not
Yes, Jesus loves me
The Bible tells me so
Ancient lore
Interpretation of the text
Desert mothers and our fathers
Keepers of oldest insight
Dry seeds in small packages
Waiting for young water
What will be our next song, children
Maybe about fittin’ Jericho
Or whether or not we know we
Smile
Songs go back to truth,
Which is why it’s clever when
We can sing all the verses
Time for reading now
And later there’ll be play
It’s a good day in God’s land
However many rainy days
Or rungs to climb
It takes to get there
C L Couch
The original uploader was Merphant at English Wikipedia
If You Love Him
A song for decades
I don’t know its story
It’s sung in its own shape,
A ladder
Every verse goes higher (, higher)
The notes rise,
And we climb carefully
When we are there,
What then
We have arrived, the final rung
Our last accomplishment
Unless, like angels, we have
Assignments back
Below
Though I don’t know how that delegating
Be transpiring
But
We are climbing
We are climbing
We are called soldiers
The kind that fight in a spiritual battle
The mortal consequences
Well, there might be some
But it’s the soul
That is the heart, the aim
Our campaign
Victory for heaven
And new Earth
Sing with me
No amen until it’s done
C L Couch
File:The ladder of life is full of splinters.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
Lighter
I was watching a war movie
It’s Memorial Day, and so there are
Lots of war movies on
And two military guys are lighting
Cigarettes
With a metal lighter, and
I remembered
I’ve never smoked a cigarette
And never wanted to
The smell is enough to stop me
But I always liked the smell of
The lighter
Steel and lighter-gasoline and oil
And whatever
As I watched, the lighter clicked
The smell came back to me
It’s childhood, and someone must
Have had one of those lighters
Not my father who smoked a pipe as
Pipe lighters are different
And he was just as likely to use matches
Someone, though, because today
I know that smell
I should try the lighter again
After all, a fine Pennsylvania product
The Zippo lighter
Will it smell of oil and substance,
Will it smell of memory?
I’m not sure what I’d so with such
Equipment
I guess carrying around a source of
Fire
Might be a good thing
A needful thing
As prudent as memory
Sometimes
C L Couch
Cool Zippo Lighter Wallpapers Many HD Wallpaper
Air and Space Museum
Light and space
It’s physics,
And it’s Arabic
It’s need
A vision helping me get by
In a crowded world
That doesn’t breathe enough
Plants to air
Us to carbon dioxide
Back to plants
It goes ‘round, and when
Done right, it’s good
I want to be at the Alhambra
Or the Alcázar
Without the Christian overparts
Not to abandon faith but
To find it in the beauty
Of healthy building
I don’t know how to reconcile
The tyranny that built it
Somehow-dimensions cast to God’s own
As if the architect had been
In Eden when
First designed
All was lush
With light and air
Imagine a veil
Blown under the arch
Of all creation, which was
The promise of
How close we might get
Toward living with life’s own
The movement
Without angels yet
To keep us out
All is green behind
After we rest, breathed upon by God
We get to go inside
C L Couch
File:Alcázar de Segovia-9.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
Universes
To understate,
The universe is huge
And there might be many of it
All around and through
Makes one wonder how matter can
Be dark as in absent
Where’s the room
But I guess dark matter is a substance
Of its own
Like tiny black holes that might be
All around as well (and through)
If so, they must be pulling matter that we know
We lose the universe we know,
And does it go to feed another
Body on another plain
And so they have such openings there
As to release their atoms
Skittering across astral dimensions
That might sometime land here
Is it all one give-and-take
And is there balance
Or is chaos confirmed
As part of the regularity, the normalcy
The paradox in making
In keeping everything together
While it all moves
It’s not covalence
It’s a dance
We all are partners
Everyone has a turn
Each one owns steps
And talent is in measure
And it’s all approved
Do you see
Whoever you are
However you’re arranged
And I can’t speak to aberrance
But someone can who calls
The dance
Does not control the steps
But gave us the hall
And bids us, as an invitation, to take part
In something wonderful
C L Couch
Honky Tonk Train Blues | recording by Lewis | Britannica.com
Sedimentary Thinking
It is a kind of blue and kind of grey
A cloudy day
I have layers, too
The trash that needs to go out
Larger things I do not need
And someone else must take them
Then there are things I never went through after
I brought my office home
They need places and a purpose
Somewhere, if not here
Then there are things I must reach through
The others to use now
The daytime things, the usual things
Coffee cups and dishes
Some desk space
Lamplight without so many shadows from
All the extra piles
I’m used to that, living among piles
Stacks of things to use, though
It’s my file system, too
My own patriotism
I have the right to stack
If you come to call, I’d like you to take something
Away with you
Please and thank you
I will not track
Do what you like
With what you have that,
Detritus or treasure,
Used to be mine
C L Couch
Colorful layers of sedimentary rock in Makhtesh Ramon, Israel.
Transcontinental Railroad
In a slow place, I wonder
I know, places are for walking
Wonder with an a, to wander, then
But the movement on the inside is
What seems to matter
The value in introspection, of hiking the
Mind on another side
Thoreauvian travel, as it were
I was told he walked to Concord often
From the pond, a matter of some
Miles
Not many
And this defined great travel to Thoreau
Because of how he trod
Through the
Interior
Pathways and passageways
That were of value to him
Through illumination
Pegging a lantern of discovery from
One part of a dark way (now lit)
Into the next
It’s like an empty railway
The bed and ballast, maybe ties
And
Will a set of rails
Then a train course over
Or course through
A plain, a valley, and
A tunnel
Maybe new passageways
Unvehicled
Lacking mechanism
Discipline
No timetable needed
Or requested
Ambling through the corridors instead
And hollows about discovery
‘Til a slide or lack of entryway
Makes us
Go ‘round another
Corner, a bend
Take an unmeasured angle or,
Who knows,
Set up another platform
We go
Out of order,
Unprepared
Or maybe all aligned
To find
Anew
The course
Or, yes, the track
Of inner life
Less taken, maybe
Maybe difficult but
Brave to try
Take it
Like the flyer (Dixie or
Overland) upon the rails
You
Be the kind
That must stop to rest,
Out of respect
For human crossings,
Not to freeze up at
The borders
‘Cause
Neither they nor you
Have to
C L Couch
Railway tracks in the sunset. Taken at Frankfurt Central Station.
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