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Jesus

Who Wins

(x = space)

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Who Wins

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An empty room

Where there might have been a meal

Smell the hope and then the fear

And here’s a garden

Pretty

There was violence here

Now the plot is done,

Everything realized

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Another foe

Who sought to shift the blame

From Rome to us

Our need to have an enemy

To stoke our places

In tradition

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The others should be caught

The followers

No hurry

The serpent is now headless

Only nerves remain

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The world has won

And we are glad

Our own strategy to overthrow

Goes back into a box

In which there is less silver

To count

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An easy price

To pay

For indolence

Now back to lethargy

We have time

And everything is scheduled quiet

Scheduled noise

Again

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C L Couch

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Photo by Daniel Katz on Unsplash

Masada

Lookout through ancient Masada building.

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Tell the Beadle

(x = space)

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Tell the Beadle

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I had church today with friends

Five hundred miles from here,

And I am thankful

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I’m not sure what it means or

How it counts, and I guess mostly

I don’t care

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There was prayer and conversation,

And God was mentioned many

Times and Jesus

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I think if there were an attendance

Book, our names could be

Fairly entered

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As it is, computers have recorded

In theirs pathways our participation so

Cybernetic stars

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C L Couch

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Sayq, Ad Dakhiliyah ‍Governorate, Oman

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Good Saturday

Good Saturday

 

It wasn’t good for us

Maybe not for God

Maybe God was weeping, too,

Though could not be hiding

Part of God was buried, though

Unless the strategy to

Harrow hell is more than

A medieval story

 

But first followers have no hope

Today

Jesus is gone, buried quickly

Inside a sabbath regulation,

A guard set to keep anyone from

Trying anything

 

But disciples are not ghouls

The body did not matter, anymore

Except that there were those

Who though the body

Should be spiced,

A practical and spiritual

Measure

 

Hopeless people might not

Have cared

Jesus was gone, the movement failed

Neither the zealots nor the

Gentler ones could have their way

From him

No that there wasn’t drama:

Judas took his money, then

Destroyed his own part

In everything

 

Maybe there were those who had

If in a maudlin way

Celebrated political victory

Death of the teacher

Who had rabble-roused

And inconvenienced leadership

If only in the heart

 

Herod who lived

Might be pleased

He could set up the cross next to

The platter also soaked in blood

A museum to the worldly-

Minded

And, to those who know,

An emptiness of soul

 

Who were the followers?

Where were they?

It seemed they fled

No one among them moved

Except some women and

A young man

Nothing threatening there

 

The Earth hides quietly today

Maybe the sun will bathe

The hilltop of Golgotha

Maybe rain will do even more

To cleanse

 

The people who are left

They have no faith

No hope

They have forgotten anything about

What could happen next

They are tired, frightened, aware of

Their parts as outcasts and outlaws

 

Only a few hold on to strings of prophecy

Maybe remembering the life, the

Healings, the lessons from their teacher

But he is bodily gone

This is the dreaded day in-between

Only they don’t know

There is another side

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Jordan Christian on Unsplash

Beartooth Highway, United States

 

Holey Week 7

 

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Invitation’s Curling—Come in, Already

Invitation’s Curling—Come in, Already

 

If Christmas is the first day, then

This is the sixth

But then that makes the fifth

The twelfth

So maybe Christmas is its own

And then the following

Twelve days are tributes,

Are a season ‘til the sixth,

The magi

The baptism by his cousin John

The revelation by a dove

Of who he is,

Which is a lot of growing up in

Twelve or thirteen days

He was in a manger

Only six days ago

And soon, depending on the full moon

And the spring,

He will be grown and on a forty-day

Journey to Jerusalem

Such things will happen in that time

The biggest coming later

A cataclysm of the each and sky

Pierced by hammered beam

And crushing empire

The abhorrence of nature, even human

The death of everything

That had been hopeful

The death of him

The death of us

Any prospects in an honest joy of living

Then the count of days, only after

And by going back,

Really begins

 

But before so much of that

There is this

Half-season of Christmas

Sing the carols

Claim the gifts

Play and work

Burn the homely fires

Testify to this

The witness in each moment

Christmastide

The time no one will wait for,

That is wait for well

It has arrived

However romantic,

The darkness of anticipation’s passed

We are here now

This is the best where and when

We have

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Sora Sagano on Unsplash

 

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Mystaken

Mystaken

 

A mystery

At night

Vespers

Lights off, no need

A single glow for reading

Another for the exit

 

I tell you a mystery

I’m not sure about the victim

Jesus

All of us from Eden

 

The perpetrator

The design behind

Agencies of evil

More than that, I cannot, may not say

 

The weapons

Hate

Anger turned into ambition

(it could have come from something else)

Wood

Nails

Hammer

Items for building

Turned to wreck

To rot

A life

From any usefulness

From beauty

 

The motive

Ask of us

 

Things to think about

Or feel through as

Later at night

Might turn to vigiling

 

Pray for us

The innocents

Those outside the drama

Now framed in viscerality

And doubt

 

The victims

Who should go to heaven

Deserving all reward

And will have none of it

But celebration

 

That’s for morning

Tonight we have a calm confusion

To keep

Cupped in each palm

(that might have held something else),

Paradox an artifact

Having a sharp edge

Maybe thorns

 

With care, then

All of us in darkling time

Taking up, taken or brought

To mystery

 

C L Couch

 

 

church at night.png

 

(moon) Image by Muhamad Ikhsan from Pixabay

(church image by) Lijonama80 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61976949

 

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Again with the Sunday-Thinking

Again with the Sunday-Thinking

 

It’s Sunday, and

I should say something spiritual

But there’s Hamlet’s rub

(not a small town’s)

About mortality or, I should

Say, the end of it,

Which is what the Dane’s discussing

One side of the coin, as

It were, the other side

Well, spirituality

Who’d have thought?

 

So here we are

The coin I have,

The choice I have

Heads or tails

Or stand it on the edge,

Which I can do

 

Do you?

This is where we are

Where angels could dance

As slender as the pin

Though it goes around

Another way

Both things, the circle and the sphere,

Are endless

One comes back

And if a mark isn’t made

We’ll fool ourselves

In the illusion

A belief that we are always going

Somewhere

Somewhere else

 

So we need another metaphor

Metaphors as analogies

Always fail somewhere

Along the way

But we have the vine

The true vine and the faulty

And would that we graft ourselves

To the stronger,

Greener branch

And so grow

Like a magic beanstalk

Toward heaven

Though here’s where plants no longer

Serve analogy

For heaven’s not up

Where Claudius would send his prayers

Not forward, backward

Interior, exterior

Exit, arriving

I think you know

Where heaven is

Open the window of the soul

The air is good, at last

No teaching no longer necessary

Breathe the good and lasting

Air of heaven in

I wonder if in heaven

All we do is inhale

 

Better than direction

Better than metaphors

Better than Christmas morning

Or a birthday

(not analogies but real

remembrances I trust, I hope)

Heaven is an invitation

Please respond

r.s.v.p.

a.s.a.p.

I want to meet there

And maybe you

Will help me

Though there’s one who

Will bring us, both

 

C L Couch

 

 

Image by Thanks. All my pics are free! from Pixabay

church war syria civil war devastation devastated

 

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Twelfth Night or

Twelfth Night or

(6 January)

 

What You Will

A modest title

For a late, great play

Did he mean the pun about

His name?

 

What you will, Will

Will who was not the starving

Artist or

Unknown in his time

 

It is twelfth night

Or the twelfth day of Christmas

Christmas, in fact, in the east

In may (and maybe your) liturgical

Calendar, Epiphany

 

In some parts I know, there will be

A boar’s head festival

A Christian way to say

We remember our English

And European roots

Deep down as they might be

Unseen for an age

 

What is epiphanous today is

What is found and realized in the

Christ story

 

The magi come to visit with the family

Of Joseph

To leave gifts for the child who

They discover is

The one they were searching for

The sky was writing them about

That was the ink

They were the page

The message now fulfilled

 

No return to Herod

The last part

 

There are other matters of

New knowledge in new light

Years after,

He comes to his cousin John

Whose voice speaks to

The wildness in the wilderness

He splits the world in truth

Those who will believe the one

Those who will believe the other

A parable one day applies

Of sheep and goats

 

Repent

Turn around

Follow his way,

Says he of the one he must baptize

Because deep knowing says they must

Do this

 

A dove descends

The Spirit is involved

To have a litany of three

Whose echoes elicited the start

Of everything from nothing

 

What happened to the gifts

Sometimes I wonder

Over-obsessed, they would become a movie

Like the subjects of both arks

And a spear of destiny

Maybe they were covered in a box kept by his mother

As was her way

To have her son and all that followed, after

 

The season before the season

An ending and beginning

It truly is

A new year

Time for decisions

Whom to follow

In the drama that our forms reflect

The play between all things

The material our due

The cosmos in the universe

Play on

 

C L Couch

 

 

Andrew Atzert from Mesa, AZ, USA – Family of DovesUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11044215

A Mourning Dove parent with two chicks in Mesa, Arizona, USA.

 

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Night in a Small Town in Western Asia

Night in a Small Town in Western Asia

(Advent, anytime)

 

We think of Jesus born at night

Though he might have happened

Any time of day

But we carry into our services

The scene of nighttime

With the shepherds

 

It’s good

It is romantic

And nearly always it is quiet

As the time of birth is recalled, near

 

We pray

We sing

We watch the candles in the room

And, if a flame is passed,

For hair that might be singed

 

In the afternoon inside the stable

Before angels appear

Declaring peace

With a call for good will,

 

The parents must be tired

Mary must recover

Their shelter is so rude,

Would they welcome visitors?

 

Maybe the shepherds could

Be all right

They are simpler, frankly most likely unrefined

More importantly, they have

Traversed in fear and

Aspect of wonder

 

I recall the gifts from shepherds

In the mystery play

Have a bob of cherries

Offers one of them

To the child who is a savior

Who says they don’t know

The true nature of majesty?

 

Then the sky is unveiled, and angels turn

Like diamonds in a jeweler’s light

 

coda

 

Isn’t there something that happens to us

Sometimes

That puts the rest into perspective

If only briefly?

 

For a moment, the created universe made sense

It had been fashioned for perfection

For the joy of seasons

Provision unrelenting

Delight in foraging each day

For new phenomena to complete the senses

 

In this night,

It was returned

A promise announced in the sky

An old one, a new one

Everything at first and last as it should be

 

C L Couch

 

 

By Robert Stinnett from Boonville, MO, USA – Small town Friday night, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69141495

 

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