(x = space)
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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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(x = space)
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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
x
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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(x = space)
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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
x
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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(x = space)
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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
x
But I know good people
Am learning to ask
And not gauge heaven by response
Or lack thereof
But to keep trying
x
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
x
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
x
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
x
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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(x = space)
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For the People
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We give billions
Might I have a smidgen
Might we all and each
Have a smidgen
Two smidgens, maybe
Our money from our coffers
Save other nations’ people,
Too
It’s mid-month and I’m feeling
Especially impoverished
It’s the thirteenth
On a Friday
And I’m tired of
Anything like
The curse of the day
Or Cain
The penury of Lazarus
Under Dives
I know, L gets to heaven
Where it’s wealthy
Without coin
And through and through
But I’m still here today
And want to be,
Not knowing the other
x
I’d like to have
Some easy days
If possible
Summertime
As Gershwin says
As she sings
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C L Couch
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Photo by David Sutton on Unsplash
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(x = space)
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Tired Love
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Everything should stop
You’re tired
Haven’t quite hit the wall
But everything’s okay enough
And you’re tired
Time to snap
Like upper and lower crocodile teeth
But don’t
x
Give everyone a break
Sorry if the world does not agree
But you have to
Have a drink
Water’s good
Be still
x
From within, get to know
The bones and muscles
The rest of you
And rest
Some minutes of this will help
If you can retire for the day
Like a vacation
You can feel that good
x
Maybe not less serious
All issues remaining,
After all
But better in a somber way
That matters
Then go back to it
To her and him
And them
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C L Couch
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Photo by Simon Watkinson on Unsplash
A crocodile jumping from a river in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
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(x = space)
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Idea
x
Here’s an idea:
Leave Ukraine live
Leave Russia live with remorse
While rebuilding
Its neighbor
x
We know
There is no recourse
For life lost
Beyond revenge,
And there’s no point in that
Since taken to extremes,
Well,
Our planet burns
x
But Russia can retreat
Tying up its turrets
Into shoelace- or ribbon-chapes
Send rubles back
With many, many helpers
My guess is
There would be volunteers
Among the soldiers
And the uninvolved
Back home
x
Let this be a pattern, then
Let the Rohingya live
And South Sudan
And blacks and whites
In the USA
And elsewhere
And the other colors, too
Let there be colors
Let there be textures
Let there be sounds
And smells and
Things to taste
The best of these
Makes an amazing world
x
Let there be self-competition
Dreaming
Without nightmares
x
In the living
Let us be fed and watered,
Educated and secure
So that when heaven comes
We meet each other
Easy, unexpected kindred
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C L Couch
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Photo by Tobias Schlienger on Unsplash
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(x = space)
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Conjuration
x
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes
x
Was it
A curse
Or a conjuring?
Did she invoke
The wicked thing
Of was she
Foretelling
Simply telling
Sisters
And us all
What would happen
Next?
Are they
Prophets,
Soothsayers
Commenters
Like the chorus?
Or worse,
Are they
Seed-planters
Giving Macbeth ideas
That were unformed,
Half-formed,
Fully-formed
Ideas as
Ambitions?
Who made the heroes
And the foils
In context
Of the story?
Who is our
Storymaker,
Storyteller?
Glamis, Cawdor
King
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We who can
Who are allowed
To rise in thought
Have plans
From our ambitions;
Pray we do not meet
The made-up
Or implanted
Witches in the mind
But choose to walk
In other parts,
Another way
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C L Couch
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Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1
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Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash
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(x = space)
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The Second Story Mountain
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Merton wrote
The Seven Storey Mountain
About his journey to faith
And affiliation
David Brooks has written
The Second Mountain
About the search for a moral
Life that also
Has in it
Brooks’s journey into faith
x
There are many such stories
(John Henry Newman, Anne Lamott
Karen Armstrong—I give these folk
in order of reading them),
And high places
Are often an association
x
Once we climb, once we achieve
The phenomenal
The numinous,
We end up
On a mountain top
There is, in fact, the mountain-top
Experience,
A trope of faith
x
On my way back recently,
I skirted a tunnel torn up for construction
And drove over two mountains
As an unmarked detour,
Taking roads who edges were too near,
Too sharp, too narrow
I was scared
x
And wondered among things while driving
How folk could live on either side,
Having these as ways
To take a normal day
x
I don’t like heights
I don’t like driving off the road, either
It’s all done now, and if I’m smart
I’ll never take that way again
There was a mountaintop, I guess
There were two such tops
I only noted a change in incline
Down from up
There was not a park or anything
x
A pullover,
A bench with an inscription in huge letters
Come and have your mountaintop here
Rather the only words I got
Were my own
That said, don’t look down so much
x
I’ll live in the valleys,
I suppose,
And have my faith life there
Or at the oceanside from time to time
It’s not stormy weather
That I mind
Though someday it should take
Me home
x
I’m sorry, this is more a story
Than a poem much cleverer,
Not much more
Than talking
In the room
Over coffee or some such,
Should we be meeting
At a table
Or in comfy chairs
Or with both
x
I have my life of faith, such as it
Might be
I hope, I even pray, that
You have yours
In a healthy sect or tradition
That suits you and
Creator and
Creation
x
Fits you like a story to
Which you return
Time and again
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C L Couch
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The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks
Route 641
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Photo by Fabrizio Lunardi on Unsplash
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