I’ve got a quiverful of children.
The Bible calls them arrows
and me lucky
and I am.
Though I’ve a pretty good view
of the target, and pull the bow
the same way every time,
bends in the air
send the one a-high
and the one a-low
and dams back in
their beaver,
aquiver.
I duck myself when they circle around.
I practice.
I do practice.
But my son and my daughter
fly where they will.
Over and under but especially
under the hill,
they fly where they will.
Won’t there be endless
progress into the past
and won’t we find there
everyone no one
ever heard of,
and won’t they stand
and flourish finally,
just as they’d hoped?
Christ to death
while the guilty man goes free.
And a white-hot freedom it is –
one better left alone.
Better to putter behind
shades and abstractions,
to sleep the many sleeps
that bring us our own.
Your light is flooding this tract.
It has soaked the grass
and risen up through the brush
to fill the trees.
And so we must flee.
We climb the trees to await
boats of darkness
that will take us to caverns
cool and
covered with moss.
Where we’ll wait, to see what You do.
I don’t like the stupid part
of being a disciple –
how you have to learn
the same lessons again and again,
fight the same fights,
and offer the same apologies
thirty years in a row.
I’m sick to death
of thinking I get it –
feeling contrite at Mass,
all that wet-eyed resolve
and the light shining on
just the right window
at just the right time –
until you’re again coughing, after,
over your coffee, sputtering
your justifications and wondering
secretly if God Himself is not choking,
ready finally to keep His promise
and spit you from His mouth!
Utrecht Journal 