I love, love, love this poem by Kathleen Norris.

Bean Song

A bean does not know much,
but it remembers the winter.
It sweats in secret, its skin grow tough
and smooth as it pushes up against the darkness,
against the weight of the universe.
Somehow it displaces just a little earth,
and everything shifts to one side.

The bean flower stands up
to see if it's in the middle of a field,
or in someone's pot;
it is beautiful and bitter,
and dies after a while,
but the bean keeps singing to itself
and song about the stars,
and the cities, and the people
who live in sunlight.
No one hears it singing,
only a few ever hear its song.

At night, when I sleep alone,
I sing it for you.

Poem a day project: day 2

So I'm going through the book "The Poet's Companion" by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. In the introduction they say good poems the writer writes about what they know and asks a question. Here's a funny excerpt from a poem by Ellery Akers that illustrates writing about the mundane:

"I cook, I shell peas, breaking open the pods at the veins with a snap: I take vitamins--all the hard, football-shaped pills--sometimes they get stuck in my gullet and I panic and think what a modern way to die, they'll come and find my dead, perfectly healthy body."

Ok so here's my second attempt at a poem. Its a little rough in some parts but c'est la vie. I have no rhythm or structure. I don't know how. In all honesty I really don't know what I'm doing. So I just write sentences of sorts.



My Chore

All I can do is wait
to rake the fallen leaves come autumn.
And all the other fallen things.
Springs best efforts retire as memories
and become a chore.

With all the fallen leaves
I remember
fallen plans
fallen short of the intent
the times I’ve fallen from grace
and blaming the fall of man
the heart fallen to pieces
after having fallen in love.
And all the other times I fall for no reason it seems.

With the fallen leaves I leave those dreams.

My hopes now lie in worm excrement.
My hope is reduced to dirt.
Perhaps my dirt may flower,
and blossom into something beautiful
or become something sweet
and nourishing.
No doubt though some will produce
next season’s fallen leaves.

Poem a day project: day one.

This is my first poem for my poem a day project. It's about redwood trees and the Church of the Nazarene. It's pretty obvious, but give me a break, its my first one.

Fairy Ring

First Church of the Nazarene is not what it used to be,
I hear
A fire broke out in the woods,
And burnt the redwood,
But the lightening underestimated the tree
Not knowing of its goodness,
Its willingness to share,
And the strength of its family.

The church has grown and spread elsewhere.
The tree remembered its substance,
The letters of its genome
And spread the stuff in a fairy ring
Around the broken tree.
The tree, the church is resilient.

can I share a Rumi with you?

I've been trying to get into poetry lately. I think its a very brilliant thing, that poetry stuff. You take this profound truth a speak it in a creative way. It's kind of like finding buried treasure, digging it up then putting it back in the ground again and giving someone a general map of it's location. Maybe they find the treasure you buried or maybe they find their own, but either way they use your map to get there. Anyway, I don't really know anything about poetry save the little I remember from high school English and Shel Silverstein's, but I got a few books from the library and my aunt gave me some too. One was a collection of Rumi's poems which of course are timeless and fantastic and another was about how to write poetry. These are some of Rumi's:
*****

"Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who's not himself
longed for by anyone else,

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live"

*****


My Worst Habit

"My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I'm with.

If you're not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words
tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in the habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean. There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back to you."

*****

Enough Words?

"How does part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Don't try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire!
Don't wash a wound with blood!

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow keeps up.
Sometimes it's in front!

Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you!
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
You boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would break
the glass cover on your heart,
and there's no fixing that.

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen and lay your head under the tree of awe.

When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout
on you, be quieter than a dove.
Don't open your mouth for even a coooooooo.

When a frog slips into the water, the snake
cannot get it. The frog climbs back out
and croaks, and the snake moves toward him again.

Even if the frog learned to hiss, still the snake
would hear through the hiss the information
he needed, the frog voice underneath.

But if the frog could be completely silent,
the snake would go back to sleeping,
and the frog could reach the barley.

The soul lives there in silent breath.

And that grain of barley is such that,
when you put it in the ground,
it grows.
Are these enough words,
or shall I squeeze more juice from this?
Who am I, my friend?"



So good. So good. I'm going to try to write one poem a day. You should write one too, and leave it as a comment!! or, you know, don't.

Little House on the Prayer-ie

I remember my junior year of high school I had this crisis time with God. I remember sitting for an hour after youth group with Tim telling him why God was super confusing to me and why it all seemed like this trick. There's all these paradoxes like, we seek to know God but we can never fully know God, we pray to God but God does whatever anyway. I think it was because my junior year was super busy and I often got up at 4 in the morning to finish my math homework, it's really hard to believe in God at 4 in the morning, and I'm not just trying to be cute by saying that, I'm serious. Anyway, I say all that because I still struggle with prayer. And usually I just kind of deal with it by either praying through it or not praying at all, but I'm going to be hanging out with middle school and high school aged kids this month at camps and I want to be able to pray better just in case I have to pray with them. And actually I think prayer is important to being a disciple and if I'm trying to make them disciples, I should at least know how to pray.

My prayer time sometimes feels like 4am. I'll walk into my room or Prescott or wherever with a lot on my mind, ready for quiet, ready for peace. Then I go to what I like to call sixth-grader-in-a-closet mode because all the sudden I have all these "am I doing this right" questions, like a kid playing seven minuets in heaven. All my prayer insecurities take over and once I finally start praying I wonder if God's even there anymore. God's a busy man right? actually no, not at all.

So finally I start talking then I don't know what to say. I remember this counselor at Mt Hermon saying something like, "God wants nothing more than to hang out with you." As I get older I doubt that statement more and more, but honestly sometimes I need that to be true. Sometimes I need God to listen to me talk about all the crap on my mind that no one ever asks about. Sometimes I need God to be my best friend. Sometimes I need God to "dry my eyes and count my tears" as Jars of Clay says. But often after I'm done telling God why I'm such a shitty Christian and making lame explanations for it all I hear is, "get over yourself white girl" and I don't know if that's God.

But I don't want to just go on rambling to God about stuff. I would never just uncensoredly tell all that crap to a friend, so why would I want to put God through that? There must be a certain propriety we have about prayer right? Or maybe not, maybe prayer allows us to drop all our fancy coats and clear off our make-up.

"Help us to not be so self absorbed with our own problems, but let us be the brother or sister to someone else that we so desperately need ourselves."- Pastor Steve prays these words every Sunday, and I'm glad. I think my self absorbency comes out most profoundly in prayer which I'm sure is missing the point. Well maybe.

I've got a lot of questions about prayer. So I think I'll blog about it again, but maybe later.