Tag Archives: children

We Wake To Hope (A Poem for My Husband)

As if their bedrooms hung with vines all around
they sleep and dream of fun and frightful things,
nestled in blankets of soft straw and grasses,
bedding made of cozy sticks and silent leaves.

As if they were little wild things in their caves
they wake and stretch their jaws with long yawns,
their round faces plump with sleep,
flush with warmth, shiny with rest.

As if all the hope in the world pours from their young hearts,
swells in their squeaky voices, surges through their bright pajamas,
through their cuddly arms and furry paws
wraps itself around you,

your own heart singing hopeful with that same young hope,
even as they cover you in soft and fierce kisses,
even as you know how they will grow and soar,
how they will stumble and slide, how they will flourish and fly,

as if they could never leave empty bedrooms behind.

Givingbirds Light

These little birds flit
around the house
lighting here and there,
sitting on the counters,
standing on the chairs,
zooming through the kitchen.

They make “holy spirit water”
and play church, wedding, and workers,
after post office, house, and kitchen-shopping.

Screaming-mad and cackling-happy
these growing-up friends
make their way through the days
and I watch and hover and release and hold
and grasp and give and wait for their light
to open up my darkness.

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.