The Things You Do Not Say

If you took your heart out
of that brown paper bag
you keep under your coat
If you cracked it open
like the book beside your bed
that you read every night
Would it scream?
Would it shriek?
Would it sing?
What story would it tell?
What images would it project upon the walls
within you hide
and would you wish to hide them, too?
Would you quickly clap your hands down on its pages
on its song
lest someone hear?
Or would you hear?
Would you bow your head and offer
all the tears you've never cried?
For whom would they be shed?

What if you caught your mind
impaled it on a pin
Watched it lash and wiggle, creep and crawl
blindly bare its mandibles and lightly dripping fangs
What would it evoke?
What would it awake in you?
What response would it call forth?
What desperate and defiant acts would
play there in the dark?
Would you scoop it back inside your head?
Place it under glass?
Watch in fascination when you dared to let it roam?

But your heart is an unopened book
in a bag
in a coat
long hung in the closet and forgotten.
Perhaps you gave it to Good Will.
And your mind, it is a monster
you've been feeding every night.
You never meant for it to leave its cage
as you took the creature out
and watched it kill the girl next door.

What if you said the things you do not say?
The words that rest beneath your tongue
inside your throat
behind your eyes.
Would I know you?
Would I know you at all?

Cain's Offering

I see your eyes drift to her again

lightly and ever so slightly

above the clink of glasses

the murmur of voices

the collage of background noise

with some dispassion I note your self-control

most of them do not bother to fight it anymore

you want to be with her

you are hoping to make things right with me
to reassure me

to reassure us

so you can go to her tonight

with some sense of peace

You are looking at her

so you do not see me

the tears pricking the corners of my eyes

the acceptance in the lines around my mouth

the weariness that has drained my glass

and left a bitter taste in my soul

I don't want your well-meant, token offerings

your sugar-cane, able placations 

Your once tender heart is bloody on one side

where it sits in the shattered, glittering shards of your mind

growing cold

though it's still beating

I share you like a public park bench

I would whisper to you of all the things I dreamed could be
of us, together in the great world
grand adventure
but you listen for rules when I speak
and your bloody heart adds them to her beat
while your mind dances with her to its rhythm

all I wanted to do was capture your imagination
I sit instead within this pretty-papered box beside you
leaking onto the seat cushion just enough
you feel obligated to apologize to our waitress
when you leave

waves

Explosions
Deep and booming,
Blowing billows of blue sea,
Heavy under the undercurrent
And rolling only small and flicking
Waves that kick our boat and bump our
Knees together.
Your eyes glance up to me
And I answer with a question:
Are the continents beneath you and me colliding?

~ Adam Barney

I Have a Voice

I am distinctly grateful that, as a woman, I have the unique privilege of experiencing an era and a culture in which I am not forced to live with a man who lacks integrity. I get to choose. I get to choose relationship with a man of character or none at all. I am one of the first generations of women who can make that statement.

I have a voice.

Life may not be easier for me than it was for my predecessors. Abuse, domestic violence, rape, human trafficking, and sexism express themselves now in unprecedented ways. It breaks my heart and it makes me angry. But I cherish the fact that I do not have to tolerate these atrocities, not in my bed, in my home, in my office, or in my church. I do not have to tolerate what was once (and sometimes still is) considered morally acceptable but demoralizes, degrades, and dehumanizes women - wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. I do not have to live with violence, abuse, unfaithfulness, and other forms of exploitation in the secret places of my life, in the vulnerable places of my heart and identity as a woman and as a human being.

I have a voice.

As a woman, I can and will be hurt; it can’t be helped. Men will abuse their power. Other women will abandon me for their own safety. I will be lied to, cheated on, used, objectified, & devalued. I do not deserve it, I do not invite it, and it is not my fault. I will not let it tell me who I am.

I count. I matter.

I have a voice.

I have a unique opportunity in this life, in this world, to pursue my own values, to build my own integrity, to practice my own convictions, to love and serve God as his image, as his creation, as a woman, with Christ as my savior and Lord alone, whether single, married, widowed, or divorced.

I have a voice.

March 20, 2012 Via
http://crimsonsparrow.tumblr.com/

I Am

in still, clear silence I breath
in and out
like a vibrant, living pool of
unrippled water waits
in peace
teaming with potential
the sky etches her reflections on
my softly beating heart
so soft
it moves without disrupting the caress of the clouds

  I am.

Did God say it in the beauty and glory of his own existence?
I am.
  this moment
I am.
  this flesh
I am.
  this breath, this stillness, this
simple
quiet
life

in the air around me, the over-flowing air, I hear
in and out
a rich, growing, moving, patient earth
unsettled soil, so vulnerably laying bare, singing
the creatures all raise up from the curve of its soft skin
new shoots of green and joy
so tender
it blooms in painstaking yet glorious slowness

  I am.

Did God say it in the wonder of knowing his exquisite gift of self?
I am.
  this air
I am.
  this heart
I am.
  this land, this passion, this
moving
stirring
life

In stillness
I breath water
In over-flowing air
I hear earth
In slowness
clouds caress me
In softness
blooms are birthed
In me
I know God and
in God
I know me

I am.

A Moth to the Flame

O flame, that you could teach me
to burn without compunction
to light without grief
to consume without shame, apology, or regret
to be nothing more than fleeting, dependent, and frail
and yet powerful
unignorable
undeniable
untouchable
unstoppable...
Would then I be satiated?

letters to an [atheist]

I wish you could see the beautiful things [of God]
you who have eyes for beauty
to see in a ragged people, hope, not just doubt
in an inadequate rhetoric, relationship, not just failure
in the stains, the very wonder of the stars,
not just the 'senseless.'

I wish you could recognize the patterns [of God]
you who recognize the fullness of the moment
to revel in the subversive within the frail
in the incessant nature of a tide that rails against the sand to quicken all,
in spite of it all
just to create the opportunity to live.

If you saw it, you would recognize your own strength
(and if you did, would it earn your respect?)
the power of your own determination
the insidiousness of your own invitation
the combative nature of your own pursuit
the way you bite into life
you would taste, indeed, that intoxicating adventure
you have a taste for.

I wish you could delight with me [in him]
because you uniquely could delight
in the ironies that you have touched with your own hand
the very proof for which you asked and never saw
you encountered
and were seduced.

If you could stand in the tension for just a moment
(and if you did, would it break you?)
and feel the excruciating pleasure, the exhilarating pain
of being broken by and expanded in your capacity to love
to live, to experience,
and to be so satiated that it is like death itself
but death that is new life.

So There

I entered, crying;
 I shall go out rejoicing.

 I embraced the first seasons of my life silently;
one day I shall never stop talking.

I will talk and tell stories and prattle and ask and
 no one will quiet me -

 Not the orderlies or the nurses
or the other Alzheimer’s patients,

 not even the grouchy old lady sharing my room.

The Sacrilege

You won't be the first to call me heathen
To pat my head as if I just don't understand
because of my poor, weak, "woman-mind"
because of my misled and deceitful heart
If man is the head
man ordained me
so I am in perfect submission
but you don't want man to be the head
when that man is in disagreement with your man

Would you appeal to me, then, to submit to Christ instead?
I appeal to you to submit to Christ first
As I submit to Christ first and foremost
And answer to Him as His servant
And after Christ to those he has placed in authority over me, man and woman alike
Just as those Christ has placed under my authority submit to me
Just as it is written "submit one to another"
equal in power and in negotiation

because there is no man, no woman, no Greek, no Roman, no Jew or Gentile
In God's sight
He will use them all as He sees fit and in accordance with his Kingdom
For this vessel He makes for rich purposes
and this one He makes for poor
Will you, the clay, look to the Potter and question that He has the right
to make one thing for glory and another for destruction?

You won't be the first to denounce my Christianity
he did as well - when I walked away from his abuse, his lies, his cheating
he did not like that I did not fall under his control anymore either.

The Call

I cannot grasp nor hold in my hands
the delicate whisper of God's call
but I know that it is birthed
in the pangs of my deliverance
through blood and sorrow-soaked repentance
from my beguilement with death
my resistance to life
and in the story of His faithfulness to me

Perhaps it began before the constellations were designed
before my universe was knit together in my mother's womb
But I know He set eternity in my heart
before that heart did beat
He Himself breathed life
and gathered up that wind
coupled it with a spirit like a free and feral horse
and made it mine

He called me by name when I was too young for words
He wrapped me in his arms as His own
He granted me His presence like the sun offers light
And I must tell His story
I must see His story, when He shares with me His scars
when He shares with me His eyes
so that I can speak that vision
into the thirsty lives of those who die around me

I must bind at every turn the insidious addictions
that hinder the transformation of his bride
that others might be delivered
from their own beguilement with death
I am to bless the bonding that nurtures human souls
I am to honor and remember those who go before
I am to love and be loved
I am to fight, to thrive

I cannot grasp nor hold in my hands
the fragile flicker of light that is life
it hides in my lungs as I breathe
it animates my heart
but I must offer it and all I have
to the call, to the vision, to the fight,
to thrive
a living sacrifice

Exactly What I Said

When I said
I don't know
what I meant was
I miss you
like earth aches for spring

When I told you
I don't have
what I meant was
I need you
the way the sky waits for rain

When I want
nothing at all
what I mean is
I'll do whatever it takes
even as a widow hosts for the dead

When I said
I love you
what I meant was
exactly what I said

I Remember the Sea

I stand
my feet in the surf,
my toes in the sand.
My skirt clings to my legs;
my hair whips at my face.
I turn my eyes to the endless horizon of waves.

You never came.

I speak.
There is no response but
the growl of the sea.
A new wash of foam swirls at my feet.

I stand and I glare at the tempest I once called home.
I grab my hair and wrestle it back into a bun
and I tie it there.
Loose strands immediately defy me;
wiggle about my face.
I hug myself close, just as defiantly,
and stare into the empty gaze
of the compassionless sea.

It is not a far-away look that plays;
It is not the look of the sea reflected in my eyes
in my face
anymore.

I am angry.

You never came.

You promised me.
You promised me first, you know.
But I released you from that promising
didn't I?
I let you go.

God let you go.

And that is who I have to blame
in this broken, empty, wind-swept place
inside
How I want to scream and hate
the salt-tinged, heart-eroding tide.
But the ocean didn't take you.

You just never came.

Who?

The ocean calls
and when it does,
what name does it use?

The trees whisper;
but when they do,
who do they whisper to?

These lips smile
kiss, speak
from whence do they beguile?
These eyes seek
but can't see
who is watching all the while.

O, to be the sea, the trees
the whisper or the kiss
O, to know my name, my heart
the eyes whose gaze
I miss

Snow Shoes

God, give me snow shoes
so I can walk through the cold
I'll stop praying that winter will go
Give me the fortitude
to press on and be bold
to appreciate what YOU chose

Amen

I don't want to pretend anymore.

I don't want to pretend

that you don't have the past that you do,
that more isn't required of you
that you didn't violate the one thing I asked you not to do
I don't want to pretend

I don't want to pretend

that I'm not completely justified in walking away
without hearing whatever you have to say
because it's all excuses anyway
and I don't want to pretend

I don't want to pretend

that I don't wish it could be redeemed, different
even though all my grace has been spent
but if this wasn't all completely evident
well, then, I don't want to pretend

anymore

May I have this Dance?

So, apparently that's it and that's
the way it's supposed to be
No fight just a
two-step dance
Around the things that are still
unhealthy

Maybe there was a moment there, Maybe there was
not
All I know is that the world
sparkles
less
When the music stops

I've tiptoed over
crocodiles and
tangoed in quick
sand
I've waltzed upon volcanic rock but
howe'er it starts it
ends

I claim no fairy tale this time but
I wonder as of late, how
Cinderella felt the moment
after
her lovely dance with
fate

Reflection

"My Valentine's Day Post"

I sat very near a pool of water
clear and cool and calm
and there upon reflection bright
did come across a psalm
for captured among the sky's soft hue
within the water's gaze
the most vibrant orchid blossom preened
in tender sunshine's rays
delighted I leaned close and sang
and caressed it with mine eye
admired every curve and swell
savored trace of every line
Unlike the irreverent selfish beast
I did not seek to pluck
but to honor this fine gift from God
and to treat it such
(for surely if I chaste my hand
and recognize its worth
then He may grant to me my heart
this beauty born of earth)

But as I leaned in close to breath
upon its fine perfume
I discovered only water where
I thought to capture bloom
And when I reached out hand to touch
the glorious petals fair
I grasped only the wet embrace
a pond's rippled stare
For hours I did sit and long
and try to earn that bud
I pondered, prayed, and vowed my trust
I offered waiting love
'Til finally in bitter angst
I cried out in discontent
"When will you grant me what I seek?
Requite this thirst You sent!"
And quietly, so quietly
the whispered answer came
that which I was taken with
a reflection of the real thing

a looking glass is beautiful
for what it does depict
but we would not look to find
anymore than that in it
Yet in romantic love
a looking glass for God
We focus on the reflection
and do not think it odd
when the fragrance disappoints
and the end result is cruel
we wonder when He will anoint
the flower in the pool
Nay, my friend, do not despair
it does not satisfy
it is but a photograph
a picture of real life
Enjoy the reflection in the mirror
but make you no mistake
It is not flower, sky, or song
it is just a lake