Straight Lines

The dawn cracks like an eggshell on a skillet
And the icy air waits just beyond breakfast
Quiet jelly toast is eaten off familiar forks
His once frostbit hand has yet to be gloved

The bright sun is as cold as the conversation
Where words are few his voice is strong
Shared silence is the music of the unheated cab
Broken only by the telling of his same stories

The frozen dirt shines its brown brightness
On the braced walls of suburban sameness
I continue to help him construct the future
In the form of a new houses for strangers.

The clouds dance along the top of new walls
Where he stands casting winter shadows
Taking measurements and figuring angles
Because he still build houses with straight lines.

This is an amazing poem from a book called "Polishing the Petoskey Stone" by Luci Shaw

The Foolishness of God

Perform impossibilities
or perish. Thrust out now
the unseasonal ripe figs
among your leaves. Expect
the mountain to be moved.
Hate parents, friends, and all
materiality. Love every enemy.
Forgive more times than seventy-
seven. Camel-like, squeeze by
into the kingdom through
the needle's eye. All fear quell.
Hack off your hand, or else,
unbloodied, go to hell.

Thus the divine unreason.
Despairing you may cry,
with earthly logic--How?
And I, your God, reply:
Leap from your weedy shallows.
Dive into the moving water.
Eye-less, learn to see
truly. Find in my folly your
true sanity. Then, Spirit-driven,
run on my narrow way, sure
as a child. Probe, hold
my unhealed hand, and
bloody, enter heaven."


Wow. The divine unreason overwhelms me. I am brought to tears at the images of this poem. I can't stand the life of reason that surrounds me and pins me to the dollars and cents. The facts of life that stand between me and the moving water. I don't want to live in the weedy shallows anymore. Depth of heart. Depth of love. I want to love so deeply that I overwhelm my beloved. Oh Divine Folly cure my sanity. I want so bad to reawaken my heart. But instead I do my best to take back the commitments of my youth. I put in my glass eyes. I stretch band-aids on my pouring wounds and stumble my way backwards into a heaven I'm running away from.