It is the way

Garden: tears of blood, cup

of bitterness; the taking and

the trial; beating; scourging;

the stabbing of thorns; the weight

carried; the heaviness bearing

down to the knees; the hammer

sound: metal striking spikes;

the tearing of flesh; the sponge

of gall; the darkness.

And so

the prison, the arena, the torture,

the death, the human torches;

the death amid jeers, laughter

and spit.

It is the way.

The cost is counted.

It is the way.

The cost is counted,

and accepted.

Today is another edition of Warrior Poet Circle hosted by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact. To see more poems submitted for the prompt “Count the Cost,” please visit Jason’s site.

Photograph: Jesus on the Cross by Jan Prikryl via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The visionary

A line of sight cracks

through darkness, finding

openings of light, fractions

of reality streaming amid

a gloom of brokenness.

Folded and tied,

the gathered curtain

pulls back for a brief

shining moment,

a morning star

in a night sky,

sufficient for hope.

This poem is submitted for the Warrior Poet Circle, hosted by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

It is also submitted for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

Photograph: Sunset Between Trees by Alice Birkin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Beneath a surface

A placid surface

an expressionless face

a perfunctory smile (Sunday smile)

a drawn curtain

an ebb tide

a portrait, idealized

a shallow conversation

to disguise, to hide

hurt, pain, destruction

anguish, panic, fear

the difficulties that are

this world we know

this life we live

each day

alone

This poem is submitted to the Warrior Poet Circle hosted by Jason Stasyszen. Today’s prompt is “difficulties.” To see more poems submitted, please visit Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Sunrise by the lake by Bora Bora via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Comfortable

Old shoes, thick laces:
toes scuffed, soles worn;
belt, braided:
waist-stretched,
sometimes shrunken;
t-shirt: yellow leaning
to white, Birmingham
Sweet Home Alabama;
Bible, tan leather cover:
hand-imprint faded,
sweat-stained,
pages smudged, marked.

This poem is submitted to the Warrior Poet Circle hosted by Jason Stasyszen. To see other poems based on the prompt “comfortable,” please visit Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: Old book by Anna Cervova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Interior Conversation

An interior conversation
in my head, my heart,
sometimes a conscious
stream of thoughts, words
but often a simple solitude
bookended by silence.
It is enough, it is sufficient
to direct the words above,
aming at an ascendant light,
a snowcapped peak or
an eagle soaring but
above all else above.

The dictionary in use
is joy or pain
is thankfulness or fear
is abundance or need
but always rising.
The thesaurus
is comfort or distress
is deliverance or captivity
is success or failure
but always ascendant.
It seems one-sided,
an utterance into a void,
except when it’s not.

Dedicated to Maureen Doallas*

This poem is submitted for the Warrior Poet Society, hosting by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact. To seem more poems based on the prompt of “prayer,” please visit the site.

*The poem is dedicated to Maureen Doallas. If you make a donation to The High Calling during the month of May, I've committed to dedicate a poem to you. Just let me know via the comment box or an email that you made a donation (not the amount).


Painting: St. Francis of Assisi at Prayer by Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1650), Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, Belgium.

At the stroke of...

A curious combination
of ending and beginning:
old, dying in darkness,
new, birthing in darkness
also
a shade of light implying
neither good nor bad,
only a change of time,
or perception, the night
ending, the day beginning
in night, yet no discernible
difference except we change
and the glass slipper
remains the same.

This poem is submitted for the Warrior Poet Society hosted by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact. To see more poems based on the prompt “Midnight,” please visit the site.

Photograph: Moonlight Landscape by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

City of Refuge

 

I wander in a city
of refuge, a city affording
a certain security,
a certain protection
one of the three in Canaan
Hebron, Shechem, Kedesh
One of the three outside
Golan Bezer Ramoth
Only six, I thought,
why not 12, I thought,
one for each tribe?

This city, one of six
is cold, chill creeping
around houses, corners.
It offers refuge, yes,
but it does not provide hope.
It provides safety, yes,
but offers no sustenance.
It provides a bulwark
against death, yes,
but it does not provide
life, or beauty.

This city’s name breathes
hard, unkind consonants.
The prudent live here;
the simple stay here.

This poem is submitted for the Warrior Poet Circle hosted by Jason Stayszen at Connecting to Impact. Today’s prompt is Proverbs 22: 3: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it (New International Version). To see more poems, please visit the site.

Striving

Chaucer hears it emerging
from the French or Germanic or both,
recognizing a common root,
the Latin perhaps, it has
a Roman flavor to it.

Shakespeare writes it
into the literary canon
as the committee of King James
codifies it into the Biblical canon,
at least for a few hundred years.

Milton lives it, intimately:
civil war, triumph,
imprisonment, blindness,
a kind of Paradise Agonistes,
literature and life.

It’s disappearing with our bare notice,
a rather quant word, an oddity really,
losing its being in the diversity,
the diffusion of contemporary
meaning and definition.

The most important thing,
the critical and vital thing,
about the verb is not the verb
but the adverb attached by Paul:
together.

This poem is submitted for the Warrior Poet circle, hosted by Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact. This week’s prompt is “striving.”

The word “strive” emerged in its recognizable form (“striven”) in the Middle English period, between 1175 and 1225, related to similar words in French (“estrivber”) and Germanic (“streben”).

I became rather fascinated with this when I looked in Young’s Concordance and found 42 references to strive and striving (in the King James version of the Bible) but only eight when I checked the concordance to the New International Version of the Bible. The NIV replaces “strive” with words like struggle, compete and contend.

Around such musings a poem happens.

Photograph: Strive Tirana.