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Morning Walk

Morning Walk

 

I want a normal day so much

One with sunshine through the leaves

Pleasure in the shade

And also where it’s bright

 

I want a street to walk along

Houses, maybe businesses

Enough to make a neighborhood

I don’t expect a “Howdy, neighbor!”

 

But real people, living

Publicly, trying to do their best

Enough to hope that privately

Private things are being worked out

 

It doesn’t have to be my place

My home, my town

This might be only a morning long

But as a present thing, it would be grand

 

C L Couch

 

3

The Fall of the House of Jesse

The Fall of the House of Jesse

(Tamar, Amnon, David)

 

 

Tamar

 

I said not to reject me after

Because with men that is what happens

Guilt of what was done

Scorn for the receiver of the sinner’s sin

 

In a royal house,

This can happen

Maybe more so

The sense of privilege that each one bears

The privilege to call a sibling in for help with

Sickness,

A pretense for rape

 

 

Amnon

 

I must have her

Own her, keep her

As a prize

I love her body

The way she looks in courtyards

And the rooms of the palace

We are family

We are royals

There is no shame

We make the laws to follow

God made it so through Saul

And now our father David

I feigned illness, though it was close enough

To truth

I was sick with love for her

I made her come to me, send all others

Away

When she came near to treat me, I gripped

Her clothing, and she knew

She must approve

I am the king’s son

I matter more

And now that I’ve been inside her,

I feel no madness and no illness

What had I been thinking?

What we did was awful

She is awful

I pushed her off, her clothing followed

She was a covered heap on the polished floor

The servants will clean that

I’m done

 

 

David

 

I am the king

I could do nothing

My own sin forbade me

How can I chastise my own

About a crime of passion

When I have committed mine?

Crimes of

Adultery and murder

Are my legacies

Not the conquests or the

Ark or my children

The child to rule born out of

Sin—

What shall be visited upon him?

 

And so in nearly every way

I stood and sat silent

Would not, could not rule in her favor

As virtue and the law would say

(does say)

I should have

Now there will be more violence

I have engendered it

Absalom must have his way

There will be rebellion

The nation will be split

There will be war

The judgment on my sin

Brought down upon this generation

How many more children of children?

 

Where is justice?

Not with me, upon my throne

Or in my house

I have wounded my realm

Hurt all my people

I will rule

I am called

I am God’s favorite

But all attributes and actions

Are hollow

 

 

C L Couch

 

2 Samuel 13

 

 

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

Electromagnetic Crown

 

4

Think God

Think God

(a three-part cycle)

 

 

Fear and Trembling

 

Something the Christian

Forgets about so easily

In a place of comfort

Where the enemy is no longer

Satan but each other

Can one have faith and comfort?

Sure, maybe faith first

Comfort without faith

Is drinking from a magic well

That keeps refilling and never

Satisfies thirst

And then there is salvation

Worked out in fear and trembling

A translation for me

Hopefully, a good one

Fear of God incites wisdom,

Which is a paraphrase of what

I hope is also a good translation

 

Awesome

Awful

Full of awe

This is what God is and

What God demands

But quietly, like a purring cat

Or doting dog

God’s insistence is, if not mitigated,

Then defined by love

And practiced

God is not the tyrant ‘til we let God be

There should be no human models

God is perfect lord

And loving in perfection

No earthly monarch has achieved this

Few have tried

Though a few

A couple of them ruling now

But what do I know, democracy-bound

And preferring it that way

 

But fear and trembling

Of the world? not so much

But of God,

I should try

So should you

 

 

Holy Metaphors

 

In my translations,

God is a spirit

God is love

And somewhere God is a lion

Not so bad for metaphors

Except they live

As metaphors cannot

 

Tame lion?

No but good

You know where that’s said

(itself translated)

Love, all love

And perfectly

And we should try

And God is a spirit

As we say, a holy spirit

There might be other spirits

I guess there are

Some good, some bad

But this one’s holy, that is,

Set aside for a spiritual purpose

 

Which is to say, then, spirit-spirit

Not addition or an algorithm

We cannot match the exponent

Though counting stars might try for it

 

 

If God Is Love

 

If God is love

Then why so much hate?

Because our choices have to count

For that, there must be consequences

This is the price for lack of

Puppetry

No strings—we’re on our own

Free to ally with

Whomever, whatever

Hate is not the absence of love

But the filling up of something else

Close to evil, too close

For righteousness is something we are

Bad at

And hating evil?

Riskiest of all

But there it is

You don’t want evil?

Resist it, mock it

(Catholic and Protestant agree)

Go another way

Ending hate is something of the same

And the fullness not of a side

But of the center of the circle, which

Goes by many names,

Though I imagine you know

The name I’m thinking of

The essence

The purpose

The last metaphor for God

 

C L Couch

 

 

sources cited (poetically, you know)

 

Philippians 2:12-13

Proverbs 9:10

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Thomas More and Martin Luther are cited.

And Oh, God 2.

 

 

Photo by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash

Prague, Czechia

 

3

The Altar

The Altar

 

If there is a conflict with

A sibling, I should not

Be here

So why aren’t the churches empty?

No more blood sacrifices,

Thankfully,

Which is not a license to keep

Everything inside the skin

Such pain to allow

Nothing through the pores

A bleeding animal would make nothing

Better, only show brutality

Blanketing repression

We’re told to go away,

Make it better,

Then come back

The church will wait

The temples with flat stones

No more Sunday-best

We’ll be each other

 

As a codicil to cosmos,

Should the sibling be a neighbor

(secular authorities

consult Henry V at Agincourt

and antecedents)

We are all descendants

Then how full

How empty

How full again

Should reconciliation be

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Andreas NextVoyagePL on Unsplash

Iceland

 

12

Love Story

Love Story

 

I should be writing about

Love, as

I was challenged years ago

By someone who no longer stays in touch

(no response, and that was that

a mystery)

To consider love in all I do

I fail, naturally enough

But the challenge is still good,

Still salient, still on

How may I love you today?

I’ll share a few words and offer a prayer

When you’re not looking

And if all this sounds way too platitudinous,

Well, remember the word

Silver has an origin in there

Something precious without money

Without recompense

Except its own

Is this family?

I don’t know, how is your family?

But, yes, I think so as the family goes beyond

Blood and legal bond

And even then

 

And we are the bond of Earth

With other obligations,

Though starting with a love of planet

Ain’t so bad

I love you

And the you is you

And all the yous

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash

Manhattan, New York, United States

#LoveWall in Manhattan, NY

 

7

When It Hurts to Live

When It Hurts to Live

 

Well, I’ve been smacked down

By those who say, I do not care

I will not get involved

Happened again, just now

There’s money on the line and

The having of it

Me more than you

Is what matters,

The currency in hell

It doesn’t have to be

It can simply be a resource

But you’ve heard of moneychangers

I must go

Where it will always matter

Where there will be a wilderness

Atop the one that values Earth

And first-making

 

I don’t know how to make my way

I’m with the eccentric saint (and

aren’t all the saints?) who says

I have no idea where I am going

 

But if you will, dear one, if only at a distance,

I’ll come with

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash

 

3

Lento

Lento

 

It means slowly, I believe

In music

Not with the grace of adagio

Certainly, not as picaresque as

Allegro

 

A good descriptor for these days

The lento season of

Forty, measured days

 

C L Couch

 

 

Golestan Shopping Center, Tehran, Iran

steady motions

 

7

Ash Wednesday and the Season

Ash Wednesday and the Season

 

Day of ashes

Reminding us who we are

We are ashes animated,

Which means there’s more:

Bone, sinew, organs

Inside (protected)

Blood coursing through all

An ocean’s molecules

Navigating life

Between the shoals

 

Ashes and water

Oil

The additives made holy substances

As well

We come to wine

The liquid and the metaphor

We still must commune

Even in a season of reflection

Many gaze upon the surface

No one throws a stone

Our sacraments are quieter for a time

We sleep

We wake into a cloudless day

With shadows only of our making

A cross, an x

A smudge

You’re got dirt on your forehead

Yes, and underneath

It is adama

For each one of us

There is no Jew or Greek

Some welcome the silence

Some will fidget

Most of us stand in between

Time to think on it and feel it through

The water of the heart

We should sheath our weapons for a time

Let them rust a bit

Every one on all sides of

The many-hedroned Earth

 

Let us call a truce for forty days

There is a promise that God’s rain will not

Destroy all people

There might be treachery,

I know

But what is better than to trust a little

In a season’s time for knowing

Everything anew

In an unshadowed light

Perfect gray

For seeing enough detail

Withholding judgment for not knowing

The rest

 

A time of trying in all ways

Our gray season has begun

Drink in and taste it differently

Our servers are mortality

 

C L Couch

 

 

Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay

 

2

Crowning Virus

Crowning Virus

 

Coronavirus

The liar says it’s under control

The doctors and the sick know better

A victim is the one who

First called out

 

It won’t go without a cure

There isn’t one

If something supernal is revenging

Us, I do not know

Nor can it matter now

We don’t know how to sacrifice

Upon an altar made of stone and wood

It’s just as well

Eventually, we’d think of blood

 

As a scientific matter,

It could work out

But only if we keep the heart of it

We suffer and we die

On every side

 

If monolithic fiends could put aside

Gilt agendas

In favor of a geode, crystalline in all

Directions

 

The Earth still shines

We are smart and still have

The better things inside

There is danger like the predator’s

How we respond will make us,

Keep us who we are

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

 

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