From the Hermitage - First Friday of Lent

I heard something on Oprah's radio soul class this morning and thought: there's today's meditation. Then I went about my day and forgot whatever it was that I had been so taken with in the first place. Lost the thought Later in the day, I lost an earring, prayed to St Anthony and walked right outside, in the snow, and found it in the road. I never did remember that first meditation, but St Anthony is a good friend of the Bristol-Holden family and worthy of consideration here. Long ago, I heard a priest talk about the many aspects of St Anthony (patron of lost objects and husbands - I have always wondered if the husbands were lost, too) for the many things we lose along the way: we lose our faith, we lose our youth, our waistlines, we lose our belief in happy endings. And the thing is, while we contemplate praying to St Anthony for our many and various losses, we can use Lent to celebrate loss: we can lose our pettiness, our pinched spirits. We can lose our incapacity for wonder, we can lose our capacity for cynicism. We can lose our differences, our barriers, our fears, the fences around our hearts. We can lose the old versions of stories that imprison us in our past. We can lay our burdens down.

Snowed In

No wind. Blessed silence
after the raging of the night.
Fat snowflakes drift along the windowpane.
We are snowed in.

I turn and run my hand
along the flannel of my winter bed
tracing the memory of you
curled against me
my hand on your chest, fingers trailing
along the broken wing of your
collarbone

your heartbeat echoes in the palm
of my open hand,
moving down your belly and across
the sharp plane of your hip
where we curve deeply
into one another,
memory warming my blood

Snowed in.

Collateral Damage

Who are these precious girls
in scarves and burkas
mortar the soundtrack
of their childhood

hungry to learn
where a powerful woman is
inconceivable

they dream in the stacatto
of war

they hope in the shadow
of ignorance

their blood is on our hands

Lent from The Hermitage

The Huffington Post (!) has a lovely Lent blog, with a wonderful variety of authors, philosophies, reflections. My aim is to post daily on my own Lenten thoughts, frustrations, whatever. And I did not post yesterday, although I did share part of the iconic TS Eliot poem for Wednesday.

Following and interspersed will be the Czarina's Lenten offering.

from 'Ash Wednesday' by TS Eliot

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Rio Abajo Rio (The River Beneath the River)

A sestina offering:


Dawn blesses the Sangre de Cristos, a redeeming dawn in shadow,
bleeding dry onto the cleansing plain, the vein of redemption
opens where the bones of the earth meet old rivers,
where the wind carries the cries of La Llorona seeking her lost children,
her eyes soft with unshed tears, the unforgiving earth
strewn with forgotten stones, with small bones of mice and rabbits.

La Llorona haunts the careless dunes, floating weightless among the rabbit
brush, the errant wind wild in her hair, evil like a tuning fork among the shadows.
We float in loss and hope, we find no words, we are swallowed by the earth.
Small crimes of atonement mock our redemption.
A storm brews in the boundary lands. Voices of children
along the ancient river echo in the dawn; the arroyo hides the river.

Forgiveness comes with light and searing heat. We seek the coolness of the river.
Shy small deer come to drink, bloody arrows quivering in their dusty hides and rabbit
bones like sharp stones cut our feet. We seek our lost children.
The dead have no privacy in our howling sorrow. They hide in the shadows,
in pinion and sage where the doves go to die; they deny our redemption
in the landscape of the past. They are the bones of the earth.

The dawn fades, the sands shift, we open the veins of the earth.
We cannot bear our sadness, we cannot bear our loss. The old river
beds are dry; they do not yield up the waters of our redemption.
Fortunes are told with old stones, with dried bones of rabbits
tossed carelessly into the fire, the future read in the ashes and fickle shadows.
We stir the cinders of a cold fire, we listen for the laughter of our children.

White Shell Woman rides the ghost ship of the moon, a million cold stars her children.
Sins of omission scar the sacred geometry of the earth.
The cold mountains yield no answer; there are no shamans in their shadows.
They do not answer to the ancient rivers, they know not the ancient rivers
where we walk alone, where we are frightened like timid rabbits,
where we dream the ancient rivers, where we chase the foxfire of redemption.

Lady Raven flies westward, shedding her long shadow. Redemption
lies in the shifting sands, in the prayers of our children:
children playing in the arroyos, children running wild, running free among the rabbit
brush, the unbound wounded, our better angels in the crimson stain of the earth.
Our gnarled hands rake the sands of the Sangres, we remember the ancient river.
Sangre de Cristo. Sangre de Madre. We cast no shadow.

I am your lost daughter.
I am your unknown son.
I sing your salvation.

Well, I went and did it

self-published (vanity, vanity) a volume of poetry, mostly posts under Zwicheraum. I have mixed feelings (being Midwestern) - the vanity of it, the hard look at those that are not so great and yet, I like some of this stuff. I do. And it was supposed to be a gift - there you go - it wasn't for me.

And I haven't been writing as much, so need to get back to the computer, where it seems to go easier for me, for some reason. At any rate, I did it (no, they haven't been mailed yet) and need to move onto the next project. Except for mailing, I actually finished it - didn't complete NaNoWriMo this year, but hey - sixty pages of poetry and photos and drawings - not so bad after all.

Modesty, that's me.

baby oh baby

baby,
you are so beautiful
i love you
i need you, baby

every woman i know
has heard those words

babybabyohbaby

and heart in hand
has taken in
and been taken in

hoping that this time,
this one time
will be different

this one time
the shine will not
wear off

this time

passion will not fade
into a comfortable

silence


And after re-reading this, I can only imagine what a reader might think: oh, man, somebody's bitter. The poem was inspired by a movie late at night with sharon stone and voyeur billy baldwin - where at the end of the movie she finds tapes of billy and his former lovers. he's saying the very same things to each one that he says to her. rather than shoot him - she is armed and dangerous, after all - she shoots up all of his recording equipment and multiple viewing screens and tells him to get a life.

It's also influenced by the reality of romance. I have friends who have fallen into that comfortable silence. Fortunately, I have not. A checquered past, marriages that have ended, passion that has not. Well, in one less than memorable version, passion was not a visitor, but I digress and have revealed more than necessary. In fairness to all, being quietly comfortable ain't all bad.

I think I really just wanted to note that my Sweet William is not the subject of the poem, nor do I fear that silence with him.