I Know a Place*

I’ve come to know a place I can call home
It’s work and love and dust and green growing things
It is the smell of loam and clean air, skunks and eye-burning turkey poop
It is trembling gnarled hands and late-night crisis telephone rings
It is a bone-jolting place of hair-pin horseshoe twists and turns and veers
It is a place so bird-filled, it sings
It is a place where grandeur and quiet and wonder fill the sky at night
It is a place where the breeze blows so strong the laundry on the line has wings
It is the smell of casseroles, the stiff feel of hung dry linen, a still place
A place where God takes the orange and red flame of fall and just flings
I’ve come to know a home, a sacred space.


_______________________
Modeled on Rosie Miles’ Blessing for a Home, an exercise out of Joy Mead’s Making Peace in Practice and Poetry.  The 1st, 2nd & last lines are from Miles’ Blessing.

Time

If time were a color
it would be white
for its ever-present
presence of all things
jammed
crammed
slammed
into this one moment

If time were a color
it would be black
for its ever-absent
absence of all things
emptied
poured out
sacrificed
given
and given over
out of this one moment

Time
into
and
out of

Do we travel time
or does it travel us?

Being Not Judgmental

Continuing with Joy Mead’s Making Peace, the Tea Time group pondered peace last week, trying to leap from abstraction to concrete realities of peace and its lack in our lives, our world.

We took paper pebbles and wrote words of peace on them and made together a rock garden, a path, a wall, and a chaos (the chaos was mine).

Then, drawing random paper pebbles, we write our own peace poems.  I drew “being not judgmental”.

From kathy's photostream on Flickr

Being not                                               

How do I be not?

Whose skull shall I hold
aloft in my palm
when,
Hamlet-like,
I ask the
being not question?

What judgment shall
I not levy
in the court of my mind
today?

What tragedy shall I not write
with my judging eyes
today?

Whom shall I not hang
on the gallows
of my condemnation
today?

To be the judge
or not . . .

It is hardly a question
of course I shall judge you

It is my job
isn’t it?

Creative Resistance

A small group meets regularly in my living room on Wednesdays when we can.  It began as a conversation about joining the church, but has long since morphed into Tea-Time with friends.  

We talk, we laugh, we share, we pray. . . and sometimes we even study.

Just now, we are diving, all with trepidation, into Joy Mead's Making Peace in Practice and Poetry . . . trepidation because this small book challenges us to make, to be peace, through poetry . . . our own poetry . . . and none of us are poets, or at least so we think.

We begin reading Joy Mead’s own poem, Personal Peacemaking.  One line strikes me: “I shall resist violence and destruction creatively by . . .”, which is followed by Mead’s personal list, which takes me by surprise.

I shall resist violence and destruction creatively by:
dancing and laughing,
planting trees and sowing seeds,
making and sharing bread
. . . and ice cream!

As her poetic peace credo continues, I am challenged.  How shall I resist violence and destruction in my own life?  How shall I take the ideals and principles that take me to Iraq and convert them into an every-day way of being?  What is my own peace credo?

With pen to paper, I begin . . . and this is all that it is and all that it is . . . a beginning . . .

I shall resist violence and destruction creatively by:
playing the cello
making a casserole
sharing my chocolate
laughing with my friends
jumping hopscotch
blowing bubbles
sitting underneath every rainbow I see
listening more
talking less

What will be your peace credo?  Won’t you share it with the world today?