Saturday, October 11, 2014

Poetry Assignment from Hell

Well, what started out as delightful time to sit by the sea and write a poem turned into the poetry assignment from hell yesterday. That's what tends to happen when the same facilitator comes year after year.Each year Richard has taken us deeper and deeper into our hearts and souls to get the poems. This year, he's pulling out our toenails.

"The times we are way out of our comfort zone! The times we become cut off from ourselves and others! Sheer awkwardness. Can we find God or ourselves in that moment?

"Could we dare write about the 'other' who seems so outside our experience and worse, our compassion? Can we find our own rejected self in the ones we want to reject? Our neediness? Not our fullness. In our ability to get along, to fit in to be 'smart' do we lose something only those we bypass on the other side of the street could give us...

"Write your own poem about something, an incident in your own life, that opened your eyes to your own deeper humanity. To your own need to be held; to kneel and touch the hem of 'his' garment.."

It took me the whole afternoon to get to the broken heart of the matter and to answer the questions, "Where had love failed me? Where had love broken me open? What in my own life had taught me the most about love?"

This is the rough draft of my poem. I feel very vulnerable sharing it here - for the first time in a long time, I'm hoping no one reads my blog.



LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

Generous and sincere prayer
bubbles up from beneath the stone walls of her heart,
“God, I want to love the unlovely.”

You know, touch the leper, feed the poor,
sit in solidarity with the Aids victim,
something along the lines of Mother Theresa
or Dorothy Day.

Instead, she hears the still small Voice,
“Learn to love your own children,
with no judgment,
no expectations,
no conditions.”

“But God, I do.”

Then the shit hit the fan.
The mountains trembled and fell into the sea.
The smoke poured out of Vesuvius.
The earth shook, and soon there was nothing left at all.

You tell me, “Give it a container, so we can drink small sips.”

How the heck do you wipe this mess up off the floor,
And wring the mop back out into a tiny little juice glass?
That’s my question.

Fairy tales don’t come true.
They don’t end happily ever after.
“Raise your kids in the way they should go, and they’ll not soon depart from it.”

HA! That’s a joke.
Except no one’s laughing.

There is another love story in Scripture,
The story of Naomi and Ruth.
“Where you go, I will go; your people will be my people,
your God, my God. Even death won’t part us,”
said the daughter-in-law to the mother-in-law.

Except Ruth never said to Boaz,
“I may be bi-sexual; let’s ‘swing’ and see.”
Naomi never had to figure out what the hell polyamory meant,
and never watched a house meant for a small family
fill to the brim with “an experiment”.

Prior to this, Naomi had only known “respectable church folks”,
but now family dinners included the ungodly and the wicked,
adulterers, fornicators, swingers,
shoot, even pagans and druids sitting at the table,
drinking from the cup.

The party got so messy it split the family in two.
The prodigal son left,
but so did the good one.
“He became angry, and refused to go in.”

“Love your children with no judgments,
no expectations,
and no conditions.”

What would Jesus do?
I knows what Paul says,
“God will give them up to degrading passions.”

But Naomi looks at Jesus,
With her eyes down, and her trembling heart.

“What would you do? What would you have me do?”

And he opened wide his arms,
and died.

Frankly I’d rather be in a room full of retarded folks*
or next to some poor poverty stricken bum on the side of the road.
Smart bombs aren’t the only weapons that can be aimed
straight into someone’s kitchen exploding shards into the delicate jelly of eyes.*

Dreams are broken.
Hearts are shattered.
Relationships are –
not.

Still, there’s only the Voice that keeps repeating,
“Love, even as I have loved you – love them.
Love until it hurts.
Love with all your heart.
Stay soft.
Stay open.
Love never fails.”

(from He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded, by Alden Nowlen and May Our Right Hands Lose Their Cunning, by Denise Levertov)

So, I watched the skies unfold this morning.




And I read this prayer from Tagore...

God of my broken heart, of leave-taking and
loss, of the gray silence of the dayfall, my greetings
of the ruined house to You.

Then the sky broke open with promise:


Light of the newborn morning, sun of the 
everlasting day, my greetings of undying hope to 
You.

(My Greetings from Prayers of Rabindranth Tagore)


1 comment:

Susan said...

I read it and felt it and connected with it and said "Yes, this is the way of it sometimes and the answer is always LOVE."

Thank you for sharing!
Susan