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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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