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Idea

(x = space)

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Idea

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Here’s an idea:

Leave Ukraine live

Leave Russia live with remorse

While rebuilding

Its neighbor

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We know

There is no recourse

For life lost

Beyond revenge,

And there’s no point in that

Since taken to extremes,

Well,

Our planet burns

x

But Russia can retreat

Tying up its turrets

Into shoelace- or ribbon-chapes

Send rubles back

With many, many helpers

My guess is

There would be volunteers

Among the soldiers

And the uninvolved

Back home

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Let this be a pattern, then

Let the Rohingya live

And South Sudan

And blacks and whites

In the USA

And elsewhere

And the other colors, too

Let there be colors

Let there be textures

Let there be sounds

And smells and

Things to taste

The best of these

Makes an amazing world

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Let there be self-competition

Dreaming

Without nightmares

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In the living

Let us be fed and watered,

Educated and secure

So that when heaven comes

We meet each other

Easy, unexpected kindred

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C L Couch

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Photo by Tobias Schlienger on Unsplash

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9

Conjuration

(x = space)

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Conjuration

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By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes

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Was it

A curse

Or a conjuring?

Did she invoke

The wicked thing

Of was she

Foretelling

Simply telling

Sisters

And us all

What would happen

Next?

Are they

Prophets,

Soothsayers

Commenters

Like the chorus?

Or worse,

Are they

Seed-planters

Giving Macbeth ideas

That were unformed,

Half-formed,

Fully-formed

Ideas as

Ambitions?

Who made the heroes

And the foils

In context

Of the story?

Who is our

Storymaker,

Storyteller?

Glamis, Cawdor

King

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We who can

Who are allowed

To rise in thought

Have plans

From our ambitions;

Pray we do not meet

The made-up

Or implanted

Witches in the mind

But choose to walk

In other parts,

Another way

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C L Couch

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Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1

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Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash

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4

Await

(x = space)

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Await

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It is a gloomy day

God appears in clouds

And in fire

These were pillars

If the sky had been painted

With clouds

As it is today

Then how could direction

Have been offered?

But they were pillars

They showed the way

For the Israelites

Perhaps the pillars

Moved as

Progress was made

Perhaps they stood still

As if to say,

I’m waiting for you

Your jealous God is waiting for you

With expectation

With transcendence

And with love

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It you had not sinned

We would be together sooner

But knowing who are you

And loving you, all the same

I am waiting for you

Come to me

Come to my mountain

Come to my clouds

And fire

Come to my blue

Come to my laws

Come to my love

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C L Couch

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Exodus 24

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Photo by Ryan Yeaman on Unsplash

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4

The Given

(x = space)

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The Given

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God

Give us this day

One second and the next

The seconds stop

And a new timeline opens

Uncountable

Forever

Light and gold and glass

Given

Owned by no one

And forever

Salvation earned through grace

Which means not at all

Choice and belief

That sometimes overthrow

The tyranny of microscopes

Chained generations

Lines broken by agendas

Made circles

Joined to other shapes

For fantastic exploration

Of heaven’s heavens

Amen

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C L Couch

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Photo by Genessa Panainte on Unsplash

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0

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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1

The Second Story Mountain

(x = space)

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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

x

And wondered among things while driving

How folk could live on either side,

Having these as ways

To take a normal day

x

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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2

King for a Day

(x = space)

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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

(x = space)

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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

x

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

x

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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2

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

x

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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