Orange With a Stem

     "This one has a stem!"

    He held an orange

    from the grocery store bag,

    swaying, pendulous,

    on its slender bit of tree,

    come stowaway from California 

    on the fruit truck.

    "It's so thin! 

    How does it hold the orange?"

    As so often,

    a response,

    served out at my 

    inconvenience

    to feed a child's 

    insistent mind-hunger,

    answered hunger I'd forgotten

    was mine too -

    "When the orange was small

    the stem held it,

    every day the stem grew strong

    with the orange."

    I answered from the kitchen sink,

    rinsing knives free of soap,

    hands dripping,

    mind kindling,

    Have I grown strong?

    Children are heavy fruit.

 

    When the ripe days come,

    Will I be strong enough to let go? 

 

Virginie Demont-Breton - Mother and Child in an Orange Grove

To Saint Nicholas

I received an invitation to write this poem when Heidi White on The Daily Poem issued a challenge to compose a poem on Saint Nicholas. Having no resistance to such challenges, I took up pencil and composed. Here is my piece -

To Saint Nicholas

Your left hand did not know, good Nicholas,

What wealth your right hand gave.

Munificent extreme 

and humbly dark,

Your dexterous style of giving to the poor.

 

This marks a saint - to see a need,

Not as a glass in which to preen 

the plumes of charitable self,

But as a gap to pour 

the fullness of a loving heart, 

till it be filled and more.

You shunned the world's remembrance,

And so, like sportive children, we remember you.

While you, untouched by all the world can give

of praise or blame,

Receive with unveiled eyes 

and longing heart

Your Lord's "Well done."

- AFB, 12-21-21

The dowry for the three virgins (Gentile da Fabriano, c. 1425, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome)

To the Periodical Cicada - A Poem

We have been fascinated with the advent of the seventeen-year cicadas. Their presence is overwhelming and many consider them a nuisance, but I see their life cycle as a thing of wonder. This poem is an expression of that wonder.

Spellbound for sixteen years
But on the seventeenth -
Spell breaks.
Earth breaks.
Silence breaks.
Grub of the dust
Is clothed in wings
of flame, body of ebony, eyes of ruby -
a sudden dragon -
and it sings!
Poor things
old earth treaders scorn the sound
of long-pent revelry
from creatures of the underground.
Clamourous and clustering,
Dissonant, disruptive
Impertinent, invasive,
and incredible
What giddy joy of wings!
Whirr, tumble, dive,
electrify the air,
and stop to sing.
Soon all this rush of noise,
resonance of the short-lived glorified
each orange-veined glass of skyblown wing
Will drop into the quiet grass
and crumble to the patient earth
Until another birth

December Prayer

I have begun to note my annual propensity to write early winter poetry as a way of lamenting and comforting the loss of the fair seasons. My eyes almost ache at looking out the window on gray trees and browning grass, and so I must adorn the drear with words. December Prayer is my offering for 2020

We do not see Thee smiling on the land,
But hear the cries of swift departing birds,
Alone the sharp wind sweeps the plundered sky
Between the quaking arms of naked trees.

Far gone from us the sudden hot embrace
Of thunderstorms upon the panting earth,
Rain rushing warm and sweet into our dust
To drench with green each thirsty blade and leaf.
The winter skies despair, lie down, and weep
Long chilling tears into the withered grass.

The outskirts of Thy city in the clouds,
Piled golden eastward of the setting sun -
Those shining trumpet calls of summer's dusk
Have vanished with the dawning of the dark,
And westward glows the hasty yellow gleam
Of noon's surrender to the gaping night.

Yet though we do not see Thee, Thou art near -
Thy mercy is Thy name, Emmanuel.
Come unto us as tender cov'ring snow,
As cardinal flames alight the frozen trees,
As sunrise turns to gold the frosted ground,
Great Lover, give us glimpses of Thy grace.
Thy ways of love surpass what we can tell,
And winter is Thy home, Emmanuel.

 

 

Faith That Can Move Molehills

Imagine faith as small as a mustard seed. What does it look like when it moves mountains? Can it move molehills too? Yes, for while nothing is too great for God's power, nothing is too small for His care. He is abundantly gracious. When we make mountains out of molehills, and then almost despair, he is still there to strengthen puny faith.

It's late winter. I've been inside a lot with three children, and being fond of neatness and order, the grand propensity of small ones to destroy all things visible can drive me a little bit batty. That's not a real trial, right? I mean, on my dresser, I have the Smyrna ministries prayer guide, where I'm reminded to pray for families who are without home and job because of their faith, or who are left to mourn their brutally beheaded loved ones. There is heart-wrenching agony going on in God's worldwide family. So I feel that a bit petty becoming downcast over the fact that the kid's bathroom is being systematically broken to pieces, splattered with mud, and water-damaged, and my top-load washing machine seems unendingly filled with wet mess clean up towels. With the crowning event of the six year old crashing down on the toilet tank while standing on the seat to wipe up the toothpaste he just flung on the wall, and acquiring a knot on his head and splitting the tank from top to bottom - meaning that the kids will now have to share our relatively pristine master bathroom (Nooo!) until theirs can be repaired - I became just a little despondent. It wasn't just the mess, it was the money. Every family with kids usually has a back list of extras they'd like to have when they can save up. Shelling out the stash for a new toilet that you didn't really want is deflating. Still, I was making a mountain out of a molehill. It becomes easy to do when you're in a small house with small people most of the time. But God is not limited by that.

I sat down at the desk in a random quiet moment while the children were playing, and flipped open the Bible, like a hungry person hunting in the pantry between meals. The Parable of the Ten Virgins. "...Watch, therefore, for you know nether the day nor the hour" (Matt. 25:13) Here is reality in its final state. Here was truth beyond the broken toilet. I thought about the horror of being told to depart from Jesus, and the joy of entering with him into the marriage feast. Imagine Him coming at any moment, any second. The sky outside the window was the blank white-grey of cheerless winter. But at any moment the Son of God whom we have long loved unseen, could be breaking through those clouds like lightning and changing reality forever. The devastated bathroom, stained carpet and leaky budget wouldn't matter anymore. All that would matter is that we had loved the Christ of God and been faithful to Him. My heart was flooded with joy - a joy that I felt I could not have had if the fretful state of things had not made me previously disillusioned with life. Was the Holy Spirit really filling me with joy in the midst of trials - when my trials were so silly? I knew he would do this for persecuted Christians, for people really suffering great pain, but somehow that he would use the mere disruption of my daily comforts as a step in the journey to fellowship with him was a marvelous surprise. I did not deserve this. I am too petty. But His grace is not like that. We never deserve it.

I return to this. My faith can move mountains because it is a tiny link to the massive, powerful joy that I belong to the returning King. If we don't get the toilet fixed before He comes back, it's okay. Am I silly enough to need reminded of this? Yes. Is He gracious enough to come to me in the remembrance? He is.

In Another Bleak Midwinter

Is it truly mid-winter? I thought the 21st marked the beginning of winter, but it's lovely to think that we're almost halfway through the cold, dark tunnel. The holiday season is rarely one of natural joy for me, because the absence of warmth and sun usually bring fatigue and illness to our little family, and I struggle with the winter blues in real earnest. All the talk of hustle and bustle seem like a joke - I mean, we're just trying to stay alive here. I got my little coughing, fever patient to drink some water. I got the supper dishes washed, mostly, before crashing into bed and trying to nurse the baby to sleep. And somehow in the coming weeks we are supposed to visit all sorts of family with feasting and jollification.

I wonder if little Mary felt frustrated at the holiday travel required of her. I imagine her being a much more godly, submissive, patient person than I am, rather than putting up her feet and saying "Go to Bethlehem? On a donkey? Now? Um, no. I'm pregnant. I'm staying right here. Caesar is greedy and power hungry, but even he couldn't expect people like *me* to take part in the census." But she did the right thing and took her baby bump to the right place, and Jesus was born in the eternally destined location. God always knows what He's doing.

All this is just a bit of what I've been thinking about the things we don't like about Christmas being the things that are most nourishing to our faith and our vision of the Savior. I remember one Christmas season a couple years ago when I had the flu and was lying on the couch feeling crushed in pain and I looked over at the Nativity display we had set up, and whispered "Why, why did you come here? This miserable, broken place of pain. You didn't have to come. Oh, how you must love us." And another time as I looked at our Christmas gathering schedule that I was jotting into a notebook, and thought, "All this to do, to be with people, and I am too tired for any of it." That itself is a vivid picture of the first Christmas. Travel, people, bustle, exhaustion, and God getting his work done through ordinary people.

I saw this beautiful old quote from Ambleside Schools on Instagram that said it so well:

"The grass withers, the flower falls away, but the Word of our God endures for ever." As if Peter had said, 'All that has grown out of this root shall drop off in order that it may be seen how deeply the root itself is fixed in the soil.' We do not keep Christmas in the bright, sunny time of the year, but now in the heart of winter, when everything is bare and dry. And our Lord himself is said to be "a root out of a dry ground," from which all the blossoms of hope and joy are to come, but which must first be owned in its own nakedness before they shall appear. If then, men have begun to fancy that their gladness has another root than this, it is meet that for a time they should be left to try whether they can keep it alive by any efforts and skill of theirs. If Christmas joy has been separated from Christ, it is no wonder and no dishonor to Christ that it should grow feeble and hollow. But Christmas is not dead, because the mirth of those who have forgotten its meaning is dead. It is not dead for you, it is not dead for people who lie upon beds tormented with fevers, and dropsies, and cancers. It is not dead for the children in factories, and for the men who are working in mines, and for prisoners who never see the light of the sun. To all these the news, "The Word who was in the beginning with God and was God, in whom is life, and whose life is the light of men, by whom all things were made, and without whom was not anything made that was made, became flesh and dwelt among us, entered into our poverty, and suffering, and death," is just as mighty and cheering news now as it was when St. Peter first declared it to his countrymen at Pentecost. You want this truth, you cannot live or die without it. You have a right to it. By your baptism God hath given you a portion in him who was made flesh; by your suffering he is inviting you to claim that portion, to understand that it is indeed for you Christ lived and died."
from "Christmas Day" sermon, Frederick Maurice, M.A.

Let us embrace an ideal of the perfect Christmas as the one that makes us fall more in love with the incarnate Christ, whether it is in jollification or in quiet pain or grief. He has come for us. By faith He is ours to possess forever. Here is joy unceasing, consolation without end.

Carl Blechen - Landschaft im Winter bei Mondschein (1836)

The Mad Mother's Song

The children and I were recently introduced to The Mad Gardener's Song by Lewis Carroll via The Daily Poem. What a brilliant piece of nonsense! We all enjoyed it, especially me - so much so, that early this morning, I found myself composing my own version in the same form. The practice of composing one's own words in another's form is a way to learn different writing styles, and is a handy way for me to enjoy composition in this sometimes hectic season of life. My poem is  un-originally titled -

The Mad Mother's Song

She thought she saw a flock of sheep
That grazed upon a moor,
She looked again and saw
A soggy diaper on the floor.
"I should be grieved," she said
"If this remained forevermore."

She thought she saw a roll
Of toilet paper on the shelf.
She looked again and saw it was
An evil Christmas elf.
"Deception is the worst" she said
"When practised on one's self."

She thought she saw her husband
Coming home from work at noon.
She looked again and saw
It was the baby's dirty spoon.
"How rare," she sighed,
"To see our hopes be realized too soon."

She thought she saw a tank of goldfish
Waiting to be fed.
She looked and saw it was
A pile of laundry on the bed.
"Were those as dry as these," she said
"They would be rather dead."

She thought she saw a flock of geese
Migrating to the west.
She looked again and saw it was
Her daughter's winter vest.
"If one cannot migrate," she mused,
"It's best to be well dressed."

She thought she saw an ostrich
With her purse upon its back.
She looked again and saw it was
Her child's unfinished snack.
"If we waste food like this," she fumed,
"We'll end up in a shack."

She thought she saw her FitBit said
She'd walked a hundred miles
She looked and saw her husband
Had been standing there awhile
"How good," she cried, "To be alive
To greet him with a smile."

She thought she saw a choir of toddlers
Singing in her bed.
She looked again and saw
It was a doll without a head.
"How true," she thought, "that many trials
Are less than what we dread."

Note to the curious: I actually do not have a Christmas elf on the shelf or a FitBit, nor do I regularly encounter headless dolls. These simply came to mind as common items that fit my rhyme pattern!