Bread and Un-Circuses
(respecting actual circuses)

Please don’t let them
Tell you
They own these
Or manage them
As on
Great stools
In circuses
(for ticket prices)

Grace and miracle

In miracle
There’s grace
In grace
There’s miracle

And they are free
And should go
Wild-seeming
As they may
Go
Outside
Our doctrine
Though we try to capture them
Ring them
As it were
With naming
Precepting
And merchandising

These better
Things
They happen
In the timing of the Lord
Salvation being instant
And grace
Cooperatively

Then the rest
(of grace)
And miracle
As if wild
Breathing and galloping
Over a health of possibilities
Exigence outside

Called in
By kairotic
Signals
And ugently
Once given

Salvation
Grace
And miracle
Let go by God
And without cost
Or a doctrine of control
But
Freely through
The cost
Divinely paid
Against
The worst of human means

Free of us
They turn around
And turn us around
(they turned from assigned or
unassigned
location
while us turned
by repentance
that means
turn)
To come in from the wondrousness
Of wilderness
To ordered Earth
Breaking through the ordered
Or the chaosed
To save us

So then
These
Beyond subscription
So we might do no better
Than
Simply
Marvelly
Even irascibly
Turn from the other intrusions
Rather
To open
Ourselves
Freely
To accept

Freely
Twice as much
To receive
Then
Feely
Twice as much
To give

C L Couch


(the song with “freely, freely” as I’m recalling is a hymn of forgiveness and salvation, composed by Carol Sue Owens)

Photo by Dannie Jing on Unsplash