Category Archives: Poems

Forgiveness Hides in the Housework

I run boiling hot water over the floors steaming away dirt, germs, and spilled tomato sauce.  They shine.  In the morning, strawberry yogurt splatters and speckles the dark wood dotting our landscape with accident and mistake, and by afternoon, thousands of bread crumbs confetti the counters, tables, chairs, the bottoms of our bare feet.

Now it is evening.  The joys begin to settle in the house, loosed leaves on a windless day, and I find my soul glistening in the mercies that come falling with sleep.

Clearing

Autumn creeps toward us this year.  The white birch
turns from  green to yellow and goldens into November.
I watch the bright leaves shout to me through the front window,
and everyday for two weeks I think how I will write about it.

Now the wind comes, and well over half of the leaves
cover the ground in a splendid circular swath of color.
The wind has taken the rest:  oak, maple, buckeye, plum.
I see straight through all the branches into the sky.

Christ, Our Infinite Now

She cuddles beneath purple fleece,
knees pulled up and restless, melancholy
as Milne’s Donkey, that stuffed lovey
dangling by an ear from her thumb-sucking hand.

There are days I ride the waves of this energy,
and days I’m frustrated and mystified,
but this day I’m struck; my perspective tilted,
and I see her as she is:

the great work of hands I don’t often notice,
sculpted perfection refined and refining,
more unique than ice crystals falling
through our atmosphere.

She is blessed, mysterious, achingly,
deeply passionate, intensely loving
and intensely loved.  She’s working on it,
saving it up, storing all that energy for

the great love-work she’ll do in the future –
the great love-work she’ll do in the Infinite Now.