No laptops, no phones, no reservations, or screens, 
and no takeout, or videos, or selfies or tunes. 
From counties here and towns there, we gathered in the green, 
under the oaks and the pines and a daylight moon. 

Three generations that by then branched outward;
we drank sweet tea and talked for hours unhindered,
and stories were told amidst the late Spring flowers,
stories that laid dormant summer, fall and last winter.

Aunts, and uncles and parents and cousins 
and grandma all circled in the lawn chairs we'd brought.
The children's brown legs curled under the discussions, 
waiting for the tales of what life had wrought. 

Our lives seemed to matter because they were all we had,
as listening and speaking came forth from the void, 
and silence was the friend of what we could add;
both it and the words were the gifts we enjoyed. 

Now many are gone, and many more have come, 
and we no longer gather in the long afternoons;
and I can't but wonder about what we've become 
since those oaks and those pines and the daylight moon.

The burnt breasts and brown wings of robins 
need the cooling wetness my lawn sprinkler provides.

Jets of water, full of light in the late summer sun, 
also draw in cardinals and mockingbirds in lyrical loops.

With an expertise like that of girls timing their entry into jump rope, 
the birds turn and wheel through the water-arcs.

And there’s water in my eyes as I see it, for I had begun to think 
the world was without its ancient enchantment, that unaware loveliness of living things.

O, to bless the creatures who bless me every day! Was this Adam’s first joy as well?
And was this also forfeited in our studied way?

First, I need to run under the sprinkler with my grandchildren and join their joyful squeals with the broken laughter of an old man.

For in my own burnt breast I need to be born again, again; and baptized into the waters of a river I once let carry my heart away.

I sipped my brandy by the butterfly bush this evening.

No Monarchs, no Swallowtails, no insects at all came to suckle the purple flowers.

I did see the bushes blowing in an evening wind the way they do when rich people dressed in flowing gowns drink cocktails by their swimming pools.

I did see the gold sunset-light on my neighbor’s roof, which sparked a long thought about what Morocco and the desert at night must be like.

And I did see one determined mosquito, desperate for her blood-supper, probe my dog’s soft white fur for a port to drink. As she lay down in the grass, protecting her belly from the insect’s proboscis, I thought how my little friend looked like a whitecap on a green sea.

Then at the last I saw that the hydrangea flowers at the edge of my yard were mostly blue, like those days I have known when I didn’t sit in the lawn chair in the evening by the butterfly bush.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you haunt my Fourth of July like a ghost.

Am I to eat a hot dog, or sing a patriot’s song, when your kind heart once confronted a Reich? Your cruciform life and loves make for better hearts than all my careful orthodoxy.



Faithful Dietrich, you knew that the recovered “glory” of that wounded nation was but an assault on the Christ, and you returned home to the struggle, and to certain death.

Why, I can barely muster the courage to expel my little poems, and cry aloud for the Republic we are losing!



Brave Dietrich, so honest about your fears and love of life, how can we cheer the fireworks that only distract us from our national calamity,

When you once directed us to a cost-demanding grace and the glory of our life together?



Loving Dietrich, you knew the enfleshed Son was the only answer to the idolatrous cult of the Führer*,  the only way to see that he was but a Verführer**, an anti-Christ.

But in the end, all that was left to you was to embody the Lamb-our-Lord for us again, in yet another incarnation of love on yet another gallows.



Beautiful Dietrich, can you still smile and pray as you did just before your naked form was hung between heaven and earth,

When so many of us who laud you now will not follow you on the hard and freeing journey to the fiery mountain?



O, brother to my soul, do not abandon me now. I will never be like you, but dwell with me in the union we share in the Beloved, and so strengthen my frail hand, my pastor,

And it will be enough, for it must be enough; and thus we shall yet drink from a cup un- embittered by sin and sorrow.

*leader; **seducer

And team sports carry drama with them like water in buckets. But the drama has no point of reference apart from the game. Like the snake swallowing its tail, its meaning is all interior. The only thing that matters after the contest ends… is the next game.

That’s not a bug, but a feature! For in an urgent world bent down under weight, bleeding and burdened, sports do not matter – which is just why they do.

Save your real passions and heart-gifts for other people and for nature’s creatures, whose lives can’t be summed in a score. When they win, we don’t lose. And when they lose, we’ve not yet won.

And so let it be said, this fact to impart: “Fair-Weather Fans have chosen the better part!”

To care lightly for a game is a virtue, and a weightless thrill is the very best. So enjoy the goal, drink in the drama, and don’t carry the loss in your chest.

And so we’ll cut our emotional losses, and hate no rivals, and grieve no bad start, knowing, as we do now, that Fair-Weather Fans have chosen the better part!

My neighbors were only feet away from the miracle when it happened. 
They filmed it all from their back porch.

In the corner of our back yard, squarely over a small above-ground garden, on a mostly sunny day, it rained. It poured thickly, like water from one of those nouveau shower heads the size of a dinner plate. Except this downpour covered the area of a supper table.

But no more than that. For only there, just on the tiny backyard garden, fell the rain that day. Everywhere else was dry.

For ten minutes – surely longer than the time the son of Mary walked on water – the rains came upon my little neglected plot, soaking the soil. Yet the split rail fence next to it was bone dry.

I was not even home to witness the blessed event! Yet the video verifies it all.

We look for purposes to such things, but I have no interpretive key.

Yet maybe something better than a key: A memory. A distant but vivid memory of a childhood walk in a widow’s garden. Purple irises. Riotous orange tiger lilies, and a primeval garden spider’s web spanning the difference.

And all gilded with diamonds – diamonds! Diamonds everywhere! Or -- no less marvelous -- rain droplets from the night before, refracting morning sunshine.

I walked in a new world that morning, a boy in the widow’s garden, enraptured in my earthly Eden.

And I’ve been looking for a way back to that place ever since. I’ve found hope in a man’s prayers in another garden.

Does my neighbor’s video speak of that better logic, I wonder? For maybe the Garden’s glory will find me, instead. I’m going to be looking for it next time.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll try to be home.

When you were cut down, I was pressed down.

When you were cut down, I was laid low in my bed, weighed down as by a leaded apron in a dentist’s chair, three of them, it seemed, all pressing, pressing.

So hard to move, so hard to talk, so hard to live, when you were cut down.

But so much harder for you, it was, I know, to be cut down. A life’s love lost in a day, a turn so hard, our guts were slammed against the racetrack wall. When we were cut down. When you were cut down.

And all on Easter Day.

**********************************************

Stevie sang that she kept her visions to herself. I’d like to be like her, but not here. 

Not now.
                      Not when we so need one.

**********************************************

The rebel tree, a dogwood’s hardscrabble cousin, unplanted and undomesticated, was always a mixed blessing. Shady but shaggy, and shedding, it over-reached the sacred deck from which my prayers ascend, and I had come to resent it. I only meant to limit its reach, but due to a spirit of impatience and an aching back, I just sawed where I could that day.

Yes. I cut it down.

Though not all the way. I left room for a future. I’m not sure why.

Weeks went by, then a month. The bark on the decapitated tree darkened, and it seemed to shrink from the land of the living. I began to think of firewood for next winter.

Then one morning, there it was: a leaf – no, two. Then, others.

It refused death, for there was too much alive in it still.

And now, a glory-green crown declares its inevitable future.

Sometimes sacred signs come from the very nature of things. Most especially, things that start on Easter Day.

You have refused to die. And I do believe, already, your crown is showing.

The conjunction is the key. And full of days.

Yes, he died an old man, and, then, something else: “full of days.”

So our days also arc, morning to evening, each with its own tale to be told. As Daddy said about the late afternoon sky-clouds above our fishing boat: “Study them. No day before, son, and no day after, will make a sky just like this one.”

And so, as the suns of our days all must set, the story of each day must end, then to be interpreted by our dreams. Sleep slides over our minds, teaches our unknowing, and erases that day gone by, like an Etch A Sketch. Still, no time to grieve its passing, for look! – a new canvass begins even as the morning alarm gives its birth day-cry. We are tied to this; life is a matter of days.

And no one can refuse it either: onward comes the freshening morning light, comes the noon fullness, and comes the golden afternoon when even children feel nostalgic. Time moves like a river through a day, sculpting it.

And each day somehow stands apart from all the others, yet remains tied to them, a cloisonne bead on a necklace. Some glow hot red, full of passions and blood. Some are gentle as the colors of south Florida: turquoise, seafoam green, flamingo pink, and taupe. A few – maybe more than that – are as black as pitiless space, and we dare not gaze at them too long, lest we fall in headlong.

Now, as for Job – well, he had so many of those. Whole strands of onyx globes, marking severe seasons.

Yet, it was not said of him, even him, that he died full of dark days. Nor would he have tried to count the happier days to make a balance in life. It was enough, it seems, to simply die “full of days.”

And so, not a long life, but an observed life is to be desired above all. “One day at a time,” the deceptively profound platitude declares. As beads through our fingers, one after another, Redemption’s rosary, each noticed, each fingered by the wise heart.

Until, at last, we are full of days.

Neither was it the great lodge in which we stayed, a lodge that a winter later would be ransacked by Grizzlies who took special pleasure in destroying the animal trophies which covered the walls.

Nor did you mention the muscular golden lake trout that struck our lines all day, or the shore lunch made from one of the tangerine-fleshed fish caught that morning and prepared by our native guide who was careful to be sober while he motored the Americans around the lake in a small, sturdy trolling boat. After we ate our fill, we napped on the warm ground, the sound of waves lapping against the nearby shore.

Dad, nor did you did mention to our beloved Peggy that we saw wolves and bears on the lake’s edge in broad daylight, and bald eagles as common as crows, and at night, the shimmering emerald sky-flames of the Northern Lights.

No, she said later that what meant the most to you was how I cared for you, as a son does for a father in his old age. When you had put on your thick cold weather clothing in the mornings before fishing, you needed help pulling

on your socks and lacing up your boots. I was more bendable then than I am now, and more bendable than you were then, so I knelt before you. I did it without thinking, only hoping not to embarrass you before the other men on the trip.

To know that you were not only unembarrassed, but that you treasured that act the most of all, makes me miss you all the more.

Would that we could share another shore lunch, and snooze in the Canadian sunlight. Would that I could bend before you once again.

The tourist cellphone cameras were there to record your arrival at Alcatraz, soaking wet, shaking, cold and exhausted.

In their reports, they marveled at your decision to do it, for you but a coyote be.

Still, I would not marvel so, for were you not trying to escape what America has become?

Is a dank old prison island better than the land of the free-but-not-free, where shackled minds choose to live in silos of misinformation and nursed resentment, and news stories are spun as surely as pink cotton candy at the State Fair?

Will you find more idealism in that severe solitude than on a mainland — our land, our land, our glorious Land — once defined by a Constitution, but now by retribution and idolatries of power?

Are the convict ghosts that haunt that broken place better fellowship than the fading ghosts of a republic we could not – no worse, we would not – keep?

Or can you simply not bear to live in a country once strengthened by aspirational diversity and a common hope, but now denying elections and selling citizenship to the highest bidder?

Maybe a lawless leader like ours is too much even for a wily old coyote to handle day by day. I once read that as judgement falls on a people, God installs children to lead them.

But then, you don’t watch the morning news, do you, old boy!

I do, and I want to swim away with you.

Then we could keep one another company by our lonesome fires in the endless night. It will be our vigil as we offer our prayers to the God of earth and sea. For you a coyote be, and I but a man, as far as I can see.

This is written in appreciation of the American Solidarity Party, which seeks to keep the lights on in our civilization through avoiding the idolatries of the Left and Right.

I had heard the dreamy songs about losing and finding all at once in another, so that loving another person was like a conversion.

But I had never known it, except by imagination, and in religion.

The love your mother and I share is not like that – it is built on steps and phases of knowing: real and substantial and enough for us both; beyond darling-dear but not disorienting.

Yet it was different with you, our first-born, daughter of my youth. As I held your baby body in my arms in the rocking chair and sang a lullaby to your always-trusting eyes, I felt something like self-abandonment and perhaps even… fear. For once I had almost purposed pacifism as a life’s Jesus-offering, but now, fathering you, I knew I would kill with bare hands anyone who would hurt you, or commission an army to defend you. I felt you were changing me, and I could not resist the change. For when I held you, I felt I was the one who was falling. And were you -- now resting in my arms -- also holding me in some way beyond words? What was this new communion in my life?

And that has never changed, as you have grown and shown and flown to farther places and stranger times than we knew then: to and through your own passages of love and love’s pain. I have walked with you through some of it, as best as I knew how. We once leaned into each other in the hospital parking lot, you and I; for we’ve been partners in wailing and working and wonder more than most fathers and daughters.

But I know I cannot hold you as before, and it may seem like the frailest sentiment to say you are always held in the arms of my heart.

But you are; oh, you are!

And you ever shall be, O daughter of my youth.

And if our devotion can have its origins and its apex in that one Love which over and around us lies, that Father of our spirits in whose arms we may and must rest ourselves, then perhaps the arms of hearts will be enough for us, after all; and all our falling will ever be upward.

Poem posted with permission from our daughter, Rebekah.

Like a woman interrupted while preparing for bed, the pear tree in our front yard was caught in a moment between dress and undress: its lower leaves still hanging on, while the upper limbs were already bare.

Was it a kind of embarrassment I felt as I saw it that cold November morning?

Or, some kind of grief?

No; solidarity. For I, too, am turning loose. Turning loose of hair and teeth and a steady stride in my old age, caught mid-moment between gratitude and the grave.

At least the tree’s release feeds the beetles and weevils below it. What does my turning loose yield?

I cannot know. Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps, as we take off outer things, we can put on inner things: rich resignation, frailty producing faith, and becoming a child without naivete.

And I wonder if the trees, like Tolkien’s Ents, also observe me, and note with mute sorrow the passing of my frame.

So we contemplate each other, wondering when the time will come when all the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations, and a better wardrobe will be ours.

.

Impossibly close together and all talking at once it seemed, they moved as a synchronized unit, like a covey of furtive quail through the undergrowth of suburbia, confident in their plurality, and secure in the safety their numbers provided.

The thrill of their collective freedom from parents, the joy of belonging to the covey of friends, and the sheer energy of their age sped them along at an unnatural speed.

Together, they were a wonder.

Then I found out that the Latin origins of covey involve hatchlings being incubated.

They need the nearness of each other now, but after this incubation, there will be flight.

You slept on a cot in the cardiac ICU for many nights as I slowly came back to life.

The news was all about the hurricane, and I dreamed that we would float away, and that the generators in the basement of the hospital would flood.

And then something happened while the morphine was dripping:  a sprawling harpy, purple and black, flew in and perched on my chest. It had hands like Edward Scissorhands. She folded her skin-wings and reached down and plucked at my heart, like a hawk eats a pigeon. I writhed, but she said,

“If I do not eat, you cannot live.”

Is this how a soul, ancient as memory and mythology, makes sense of bypass surgery?

I, a preacher, had no capacity to praise then. My rest was my only devotion; it was an involuntary Sabbath.

But you --
and you alone --
were the PICC line into my heart, bringing tender things to me.

And then, at last, I understood: “In sickness and in health...”

The unctuous swath of electric life that ever follows me
(for in it I live and move and have my being) –

those virtual realities living inside virtual realities, algorithms and neurons dancing a waltz where each leads and both follow –

and then, still thinking about thoughts about thinking:
that constant introspection that has always indwelt me like a busy poltergeist, helping and hurting but always distancing me from the world in its vital immediacy –

And now, the appalling polls and gerrymandered parties,
taking up space in my mind too, as though I could will a people into indignation at their political self-abasement and cultural suicide –

that spell was broken last night when the barred owl brought its severe blessing.

It didn’t mean to – just hunting in the dead of night in our back yard;  
a silent, ancient killer, now a secret suburban raptor, coldly watching our little lap dog take her ill-timed pee.

My flashlight pinned it in confusion on the back fence line, but it was not afraid.  
It is the apex predator in this neighborhood, pausing only to decide if it could hoist the ten-pound Shih Tzu by a thrust of its massive wings.

The great owl indulged me for minutes.

Its presence was its present; its sclera-less eyes offered only the inky soullessness of instinct. When its head turned from east to west, its grey cloak of feathers, the shawl of a wizard, hardly moved.

I called out to our pup in anxiety. The bird, like God, was not impressed by a human’s voice, staring blankly back.

Then, in an instant, it dropped off the fence rail, almost touching the ground, its wide wings spread out to cast a shadow even in the dim light. It flew almost to me, passing by my shoulder into the night that lay between the sleeping households.

Like an alien from another realm, 
the barred owl brought its liberating blessing and then receded back into the world of things present, but unseen.

Ever since I saw them land on my fishing pole in the bream ponds of South Carolina, I have thought of these creatures as travelers between the material and spiritual worlds, iridescent sprites of sacred realms who visit us for reasons we do not fully comprehend.

My efforts at poetry seek to mimic the mystic mission of the dragonfly: bridging things seen and unseen, springing from earth to heaven and back again by contemplating the glory embedded in daily life. Langston Hughes was right, after all: “Every poet is a thief; a poet steals from the world around them, transforming it into art.”

Like wet cement, my prose poems never seem quite finished to me, but hopefully, as they solidify in your mind, they can become substantial things that will enable you to stand upright in what, to me anyway, is too often a dehumanizing world culture and shamelessly corrupt political context. I am a pastor by vocation, but my service to my Redeemer in this is not to dress up Sunday School lessons in pretty poetic language. Rather, with what I hope is fearless honesty and gratitude which springs from long contemplation, I would quicken you (and me, no less) to a life of love -- and an ongoing pilgrimage of wonder through this spangled stage of sorrows that is our life together. In the wise language of Robert Frost, “The purpose of poetry is to take life by the throat.”

One cannot have a goal like that and avoid the darkening skies of our times. Some of my poems have political and social aspects to them that you might find provocative. Well and good. I cannot apologize for speaking the truth in love, and, God helping me, I never will. As the rather notorious poet Allen Ginsberg once declared, “Poetry is not an expression of the party line.”

I encourage you to read these poems out loud and with a deliberate, unhurried speed. Reading a poem too fast is like chugging a fine wine – it sort of misses the point!