unripe blueberries are
not miniature death-stars
waiting to zap planets
with blinding acid juice
but if they were how would
we even find out? all mine
in the backyard find
their way to the bellies
of mockingbirds before
I can verify the
of future muffin bombs
or glean a cheek-pursing
snack while cutting the grass
Image: Original Artwork, May 2019.
With fear and great joy
They ran to tell.
If your kind and faithful friend had died
A gruesome death and then said, “Good morning!”
From behind as you went to put flowers
On their fresh-tilled grave, what would you do?
Where do you run
With fear and great joy?
How is a new world announced? “Do not fear”
Whispered with power, growing, rippling out
To hill and hollow, city, field, and slum
With the holy whiplash of redemption.
With fear and great joy
You catch your breath.
Frozen with longing for something not yet,
Glass-eyed, like a road-killed coyote in
The unfinished howl of rigor mortis.
Truth is the hardest story to swallow.
What do you see
Through fear and great joy?
Each friendship is resurrection practice,
Reaching for love and faith and hope and rest
Knowing full-well that time and space and sin
And death challenge every effort, but still
With fear and great joy
You hold them tight.
Darkness first fell in the garden light made.
Hope wept in a garden after midnight,
And life proved new in a garden at dawn.
Can oaks of righteousness rise from dry bones
With fear and great joy,
Running to tell?
How does one gain the confidence
Of a finch that flies headlong
Into an arborvitae?
A mass of tangled greens that might,
(Or not) hold a nest, eggs, mate, home,
Or at least defray the rain a moment.
Is it instinct that creates faith?
Or memory of the warm twirl of grass
And feathers that gives courage to return?
Whatever credence I enjoy
Passes through me, a current
From fixed point to fixed point.
The heart is no dynamo,
And unworthy of trust.
Belief is a signpost
Pointing only to itself,
A shadow of a shadow
From which no flutter bursts forth.
Image: Snow at Sunset Rock, Lookout Mountain, Tenn., December 2017.
thirty-five years
the mountains and forests have
called loudly my name and I have tried
to follow their forceful
impetus running toward
looming hills looming woods
with leaps and strides
looming closer till
not one day
was less to me than inundating
discursive full of wonder
its pale dawn showing
through the curves of the fog
behind condensated windows
all the misted host of the Blue Ridge
thirty-five
and again this morning as always
I am freed as the thought comes forth
small yet delightful and I am feeling
that language
is not like a river
is not a tree is not mountains but
is the thing pulling them out of the void
wholly continually
from eternity and I
breathe back humble metered praise.
Hardscrabble 