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Very Tall Bill

(x = space)

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Very Tall Bill

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My college roommate died

I saw a blurb in a newsletter

Then went to find an article

He was a teacher

A theatrician

William Kennedy, Ph.D.

Known as Bill to most

And to me

He was a good guy

In the way that guys

That people

Can be good

He was ill

How badly I did not know

I guess the illness took him

At the last

His brother is survived

I knew him some

I knew Bill better

And sometimes wondered

What a pair

So oddly matched

His six-foot and a half frame

(I never really knew

the measurement)

My five-nine

Walking somewhere

At school

And the day we dared

Walk on the grass

Against a rule

To play some Frisbee

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I am sad

Through and through,

It seems

So as if to feel numb

For a while, now

God take and keep Bill

Teaching

Writing plays

Making productions for

Heaven’s revue

I trust

There is Dad’s Root Beer there

In the green room

At the cast party

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C L Couch

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Bill taught and wrote, directed plays for decades in his scholarly, professorial career.

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Comedy and Tragedy masks from the Princess Theatre, Decatur, Alabama

image by Marjorie Kaufman

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38298189

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The Second Story Mountain

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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

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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

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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

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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

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And wondered among things while driving

How folk could live on either side,

Having these as ways

To take a normal day

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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King for a Day

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King for a Day

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King for a day

His day

Our day

Faithful king

Sinful king

Silenced before prophecy

The parable of Nathan

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We want a king

God gave Saul

Maybe for this next time

God chose a favorite

A paradox

Youth against wisdom

Music versus war

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The height of Goliath

(or of Saul)

Against the reach

Of sling and stone

And the power to be favored

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C L Couch

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

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Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

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

England, UK

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Renovations of Divine Love

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Renovations of Divine Love

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She saw creation

In a hazelnut

The way Blake saw the universe

In a grain of sand

And microscopes would render

Microcosms,

Subatomic worlds

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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

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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

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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

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C L Couch

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Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash

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One Morning, Late

(x = space)

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One Morning, Late

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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

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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

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How does it feel?

How do you feel?

It happens everywhere

In the expanding universe

That also ages

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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

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The attic

Of creation waits

When we’re all gathered,

The roof comes off

Our house

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C L Couch

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

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Triangulum Galaxy

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

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May Polemics

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May Polemics

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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

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C L Couch

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Photo by Yuliia Tretynychenko on Unsplash

Kyiv, Ukraine

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

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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.

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Witches Night Out

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Witches Night Out

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Tonight is

Walpurgisnacht

Witches night out

We need good witches

We need the magic

And the healing

That come from

Spells and herbs,

Fire over earth

And managed wood

All sharing stories from a sky

Of past and present

Drifting toward a future

Not quite writ

Or conjured

Not yet

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C L Couch

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Walpurgisnacht 2022

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introduced by Doctor Hilda Kring in my (our) college class Folklore and Folk Literature

Walpurgisnacht is celebrated ironically—as a Christian festival and observation and as an occult celebration, too; some take it to be a Christianized, pre-Christian holiday

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Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash

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Alternatives

(x = space)

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Alternatives

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We get messages

From the front

It’s not our front

We read about Ebola outbreaks

That are not ours

Unsafe water

Not in our country

Well, there’s Flint

And all the systems that

Are going bad

But we have plastic bottles

And filters to shove under

Our faucets

Until our systems

Are repaired

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We hear of civil wars

In other countries

But they don’t happen here

Except for hate

Two parties at each other’s throats

And so much violence

On the streets

In schools

In homes

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We see, it happens everywhere

The devil’s stratagems

And our own

Inside us

Once we’ve stultified the good

And the alternatives

That the buzz inside our ears

Behind our eyes

Wherever

Telling us it’s too crazy

To imagine

To start

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C L Couch

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Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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Earthy

(x = space)

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Earthy

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These are the scents,

what I smelled as I was

driving back from Pittsburgh:

coal and tar and asphalt

as if mixed together, a

smell I can recall from childhood when

in the city;

manure, may times, because

it’s planting time;

plant-life already grown and

emanating from blooms in trees,

perennials along the road;

whatever smell

a clear, cold sky possesses

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C L Couch

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