The Bible doesn’t lead us to believe it would be any different. That story moves from the expulsion from the garden to the first murder to slavery in Egypt to forty years in the desert. In the promised land Israel is surrounded by enemies and then forced into exile. Then John the Baptist is killed and Jesus is tortured and killed. So why do I, in name a Christian, so quickly complain when my life isn’t easy? As if the suffering were for Christ and only the resurrection for me.
Tag Archives: suffering
Kshanti
Your round face, scarf
and wide-closed eye –
I’ll never see the Buddha
another way again
For Maya
Psalm 151: Or, of broken women and a host of drug-addicted men
I don’t watch zombie shows but know something about what
emerges from thy dank wood in the boonies, Lord –
have as need be hid behind equal trees,
backing and circling ever outward, dodging
hands and cool blank eyes, upward yes
into the air, “free” of it all, now, over there.
But you, wide and ghostly, neither leave nor solve
but hang, steady as the mist, as drops on ferns,
spores of the underside, your heart
rotting out the log. Till when? – we change?
Your breath is gone, but hold it still.
For we’ll not, ever, no matter what we’ve got,
(hell if we will)
change.
A meditation on time and suffering
We could throw away all the clocks
and move freely through time,
get ahead of our sufferings
and swerve round them,
circle back and laugh.
Impotent suffering.
Fool.
But wouldn’t we then, even then
carry inside what we’d lost
and know it
and die?
God knows every manner of suffering
It seemed like a fine plan,
writing Himself into His own work,
to taste and be tasted –
descending in scarlet,
sinking to flesh –
but who knew the life of man
was a brutal current turning,
slow and wide
then swifter and deeper
till the sky
became
a little white circle climbing
Awake to the same facts
I close my eyes and try again
The latest vast surge
Of iniquity
starts with the usual
shift and give –
O God! –
a shudder under
some distant sea
that jumps to run invisibly
to slap and scatter
and stink and stay.
Harrowing
He dropped to where
there’s no dropping lower.
Trout
She lays her eggs
in a gravel nest,
crowns them with rock
and flees.
Another glove dropped
Another lost single.
Sometimes
someone
will pick one up
and stick it on a branch.
And then it waves
wanly.
