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Think God

Think God

(a three-part cycle)

 

 

Fear and Trembling

 

Something the Christian

Forgets about so easily

In a place of comfort

Where the enemy is no longer

Satan but each other

Can one have faith and comfort?

Sure, maybe faith first

Comfort without faith

Is drinking from a magic well

That keeps refilling and never

Satisfies thirst

And then there is salvation

Worked out in fear and trembling

A translation for me

Hopefully, a good one

Fear of God incites wisdom,

Which is a paraphrase of what

I hope is also a good translation

 

Awesome

Awful

Full of awe

This is what God is and

What God demands

But quietly, like a purring cat

Or doting dog

God’s insistence is, if not mitigated,

Then defined by love

And practiced

God is not the tyrant ‘til we let God be

There should be no human models

God is perfect lord

And loving in perfection

No earthly monarch has achieved this

Few have tried

Though a few

A couple of them ruling now

But what do I know, democracy-bound

And preferring it that way

 

But fear and trembling

Of the world? not so much

But of God,

I should try

So should you

 

 

Holy Metaphors

 

In my translations,

God is a spirit

God is love

And somewhere God is a lion

Not so bad for metaphors

Except they live

As metaphors cannot

 

Tame lion?

No but good

You know where that’s said

(itself translated)

Love, all love

And perfectly

And we should try

And God is a spirit

As we say, a holy spirit

There might be other spirits

I guess there are

Some good, some bad

But this one’s holy, that is,

Set aside for a spiritual purpose

 

Which is to say, then, spirit-spirit

Not addition or an algorithm

We cannot match the exponent

Though counting stars might try for it

 

 

If God Is Love

 

If God is love

Then why so much hate?

Because our choices have to count

For that, there must be consequences

This is the price for lack of

Puppetry

No strings—we’re on our own

Free to ally with

Whomever, whatever

Hate is not the absence of love

But the filling up of something else

Close to evil, too close

For righteousness is something we are

Bad at

And hating evil?

Riskiest of all

But there it is

You don’t want evil?

Resist it, mock it

(Catholic and Protestant agree)

Go another way

Ending hate is something of the same

And the fullness not of a side

But of the center of the circle, which

Goes by many names,

Though I imagine you know

The name I’m thinking of

The essence

The purpose

The last metaphor for God

 

C L Couch

 

 

sources cited (poetically, you know)

 

Philippians 2:12-13

Proverbs 9:10

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Thomas More and Martin Luther are cited.

And Oh, God 2.

 

 

Photo by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash

Prague, Czechia

 

3

The Altar

The Altar

 

If there is a conflict with

A sibling, I should not

Be here

So why aren’t the churches empty?

No more blood sacrifices,

Thankfully,

Which is not a license to keep

Everything inside the skin

Such pain to allow

Nothing through the pores

A bleeding animal would make nothing

Better, only show brutality

Blanketing repression

We’re told to go away,

Make it better,

Then come back

The church will wait

The temples with flat stones

No more Sunday-best

We’ll be each other

 

As a codicil to cosmos,

Should the sibling be a neighbor

(secular authorities

consult Henry V at Agincourt

and antecedents)

We are all descendants

Then how full

How empty

How full again

Should reconciliation be

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Andreas NextVoyagePL on Unsplash

Iceland

 

12

Love Story

Love Story

 

I should be writing about

Love, as

I was challenged years ago

By someone who no longer stays in touch

(no response, and that was that

a mystery)

To consider love in all I do

I fail, naturally enough

But the challenge is still good,

Still salient, still on

How may I love you today?

I’ll share a few words and offer a prayer

When you’re not looking

And if all this sounds way too platitudinous,

Well, remember the word

Silver has an origin in there

Something precious without money

Without recompense

Except its own

Is this family?

I don’t know, how is your family?

But, yes, I think so as the family goes beyond

Blood and legal bond

And even then

 

And we are the bond of Earth

With other obligations,

Though starting with a love of planet

Ain’t so bad

I love you

And the you is you

And all the yous

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash

Manhattan, New York, United States

#LoveWall in Manhattan, NY

 

7

When It Hurts to Live

When It Hurts to Live

 

Well, I’ve been smacked down

By those who say, I do not care

I will not get involved

Happened again, just now

There’s money on the line and

The having of it

Me more than you

Is what matters,

The currency in hell

It doesn’t have to be

It can simply be a resource

But you’ve heard of moneychangers

I must go

Where it will always matter

Where there will be a wilderness

Atop the one that values Earth

And first-making

 

I don’t know how to make my way

I’m with the eccentric saint (and

aren’t all the saints?) who says

I have no idea where I am going

 

But if you will, dear one, if only at a distance,

I’ll come with

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash

 

3

Lento

Lento

 

It means slowly, I believe

In music

Not with the grace of adagio

Certainly, not as picaresque as

Allegro

 

A good descriptor for these days

The lento season of

Forty, measured days

 

C L Couch

 

 

Golestan Shopping Center, Tehran, Iran

steady motions

 

7

Crowning Virus

Crowning Virus

 

Coronavirus

The liar says it’s under control

The doctors and the sick know better

A victim is the one who

First called out

 

It won’t go without a cure

There isn’t one

If something supernal is revenging

Us, I do not know

Nor can it matter now

We don’t know how to sacrifice

Upon an altar made of stone and wood

It’s just as well

Eventually, we’d think of blood

 

As a scientific matter,

It could work out

But only if we keep the heart of it

We suffer and we die

On every side

 

If monolithic fiends could put aside

Gilt agendas

In favor of a geode, crystalline in all

Directions

 

The Earth still shines

We are smart and still have

The better things inside

There is danger like the predator’s

How we respond will make us,

Keep us who we are

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

 

0

Fat Chances

Fat Chances

 

You know, I think it might be

Mardi Gras

Crept up on me this year

Probably last year, too

 

Fat Tuesday

Fastnacht in these parts

Shrove Tuesday

Shrove another word for

Get the fat out of the house

Ascetic Lent is coming

Tonight we consume or share

Tomorrow we wear ashes

 

I know our cultures

Make much in making merry

Merry’s fine

Merry’s good

Maybe we’ll smile the smile of knowing

During Lent

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Amy Syiek on Unsplash

Boston, United States

An early morning stroll through Somerville I could smell the donuts … amazing! http://unionsquaredonuts.com/

(fastnacht in German Pennsylvania is also a food, not unlike a doughnut)

 

6

Charity

Charity

(for normal people)

 

The old King James word

For love

It can permeate

In the old-fashioned way

A cloud of knowing

For a change

When giving has a cost

It isn’t easy

Whether it’s largesse

Or widows’ mites

 

Giving ‘til it hurts

I question if there is

Meaning in that

But giving as a passion

New kind of love

Not ‘til there’s nothing

There will come new rounds

But with awareness

There is feeling

There is healing

Florence Nightingale

Who sang not her praises

But encouragement

While wandering the battlefield

Clara Barton in the USA

Doing the same

Could you give that away?

I couldn’t

But I have a mite, maybe two mites

Someone may have one

It wouldn’t hurt

(so much)

Especially if I knew the story

 

I know, there is belief

Cynics are smart

And should have their way

While everything is suspect now

So it might turn from mindful giving

Into something mindless

Sometimes

 

Sometimes

Give anyway?

There might be something

In surprises

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Maheima Kapur on Unsplash

and is that the world turning in the center

 

3

More

More

 

There’s something more

It’s here

Inside the pale blue

Between the yellow light

And the branch’s skin

There is green, too,

Dark in the shadow

 

We can make it human

I suppose we always do

But there is another planet here,

A world whose talk

Is in the leaves

Whose senses know the light

And every color

Every texture,

Each thing that moves so that

Another thing might live—

It’s all cooperation

 

Learn from this

Don’t make it human yet;

It’s intimate already

It’s conscious because energy

Has wisdom

And gravity a story

 

The tree is a tale that moves

And also waits

So much to tell

More so than mute artifice

We should know this

And as we don’t

 

So wait!

All things are here

Enough for life, because it’s life

A history if

We could pull the sunbeams from the

Earth to read

We can’t for now

 

So listen, please

With all concrete senses

Best that we can do—

Please, listen

To the story that could save us

Every day,

If we don’t destroy

The binding and

The pages

Let ink run as blood from entropy,

Our self-made ruin

Of whole things,

Run into empty land

And lifeless water

 

Reclaimed by

An angry universe

Having expected

So much more

With all that had been given

Every word in nature

 

No wonder why

The angel kept, outside

Of paradise,

A flaming sword

Pressed by what’s inside

Ignited by protection of what’s true,

True stories, more

Than what we wrote

And what we wrote that we forget

 

Still having a last chance to hear

To receive

If only by the gateway,

A last chance to learn

 

C L Couch

 

 

Photo by Erico Marcelino on Unsplash

The Wanaka Tree, New Zealand

 

7

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