Tag Archives: Catholic poetry

A Day After Snow

The air is filled
with flashes of sun,
like it broke into bits
and the wind now blows it apart,
all these separate pieces, everywhere.

Countless more flecks of sun spin
through everything, too small to see,
hidden in the depths of us,
of creation, the depths of everywhere,
everything water in every form.

We bounce around the side roads to home
over ridges of frozen slushed snow,
see our frontyard snowmen smiling:
welcome sun, above, below, within, without;
temperatures change, miracles abound.

God beyond God

  “God is always beyond God, the iconoclast par excellence,
who over and over breaks out of the forms and symbols of our making.”
~ Bernard J. Lee, SM

I stand at the sink
scrubbing the shiny steel pan
when my littlest one asks me to read.

I ask for his patience,
one, two, three times, and
so he reads to me,

“Mom is beautiful, her hair,
her face, she is beautiful.
Her heart is love.”

And then I know
the vast and mighty love
that pours itself from the smallest vessels.

Hope Song

Through the course of
preoccupation with understanding
I keep shadowed
under the canopy of a forest
built with efforts of every shape:
goldened oaks, and old worries,
fired maples and malcontent,
bronzed birches and weeping brokenness,
flamed crab-apples and crooked-perfection;
the leaves are snapping free of the twig,
while mistakes release to the noisy wind.
Watch, watch the light beam through branches,
all barreness revealed and revealing
the turns of days and nights
growing and sleeping under the steady skies,
the reciprocity of love’s vulnerability and strength,
its whispered song of faith.