cell

What Shall Break Through

1
Unreadiness

Winter quiet
Though it’s weeks
Away
The sky is thinking on it
And the ground becomes more laden
Storing what it needs to store
Welcoming the flora
Fauna
That shall be sleeping there

It looks like snow
And if I were outside
I might say it smells like snow as well
Breathes
The new season
However apprehensively
About extremities
Of ice in breath
And snow
That the insides of our bodies
Will not be ready for
If ever

Like the extremes of summer
I suppose

2
Birth of a Mystic

Still
And still
Like the monk
The hermit
I await
And
Yes
These could be women
And each was

The desert mothers
Julian and cat
(female or male cat
I do not know
or
if there were ever
any kittens)

Hildegard
Teresa
Evelyn for the moderns
And who waits inside the cave
For insight now

Who bears the vision
We shall hear about
That
Shall be approved

A new generation
One of those young persons
Who dreamed dreams
And set them down
Enough
For publication
Or simply hearing here and there
Now and then
Until
The books
With illustrations
Shall appear
And we shall know we have something
Set
And new

3
Dream Dreams

And shall the winter bring them on
The ordinary
And the visionary
Angels adept upon the scene
To work
With mortals
To let grace behind the curtain
Become miracle
Upon the stage

Though none of it is acting
Though it might be staged like
Jacob
Or like Bethlehem
Or the leaping suns
At Fatima

Or like the truce of 1914
That was like
That was
Grace
And miracle as well
Human gifts
No doubt angel-approved
When all could breathe
A moment
Inside heaven
While on the field
The wired
Trenched
And blooded field
There could be such a peace
For a few hours
Even gifts and photographs
To mark
The Christmas season

And now
I am afield
Dealing in ordinary mystics
But they’re there
They’re here
Thank goodness
And with
The names
And books
And famous patroned pets
Shall breathe in each of us beholding

C L Couch

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Sanctuary

Because one is still

Does not mean that one is safe—

Life in one cell is open to

Mutation, loss of parts, disease;

Life within a prison cell

Suffers from same dangers

In detention and in

Isolation

(Even with others in proximity),

Under death-order and maybe death-

Watch;

How,

Fixed under a demon’s yoke

Whose cause is politics,

Who for an idea

Has been taken out

Of actual existence?

Toward the Southern Pole

(Closer than most of us will

Get), there is a Russian Orthodox

Church—

Ten bodies with ten souls within

May worship;

The rest know that the church is

There:

Triptychs of spirit and of hope

Inside

At the end of the world,

Where there is likelihood

Of living through oppression

Wrought by nature or assignment.

What sanctuary in the prison cell,

Where trapped mind and abandoned

Spirit are closed maybe for a

Final time,

Where fear

The only inner company?

Andy awaits

Release of one kind or

Another.

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/23100

Kidnapped Briton spends 700th day in illegal detention

A British man who is held under sentence of death in Ethiopia has spent his 700^thday in unlawful detention, after he was kidnapped and rendered to the country by Ethiopian forces in 2014.