Sometimes when I see him
in his black cowboy shirt
shining belt buckle
handsome chiseled jaw
I think I’d give it all up for him
I could live like this
out here
with the prairie dogs
and antelope skulls
the paint mines
the new rodeo and auction
I could live among the closed minded baptists
with their fire and brimstone preachers
with the owls that swoop low
over the fields at night
over the long highway
occasionally dotted with
a tree
a house
a windmill.
So quiet
spacious
majestic
lonely.
I could make my place here
not missing for one minute
all that I’d left behind.
For him
with him
I could do anything.
another kind of church
The halls of detention
are where I come to pray.
Ushered through double locking doors
only adornment concrete walls
occasional sunlight streams
through unstained glass
a choir of guards
teachers and counselors
singing hymnals of order and rules.
The devout – lines of children
arms behind their back
shuffling in plastic shoes
I kneel in the suffering of children
prostrated in their reality.
I can’t explain easily to others
why I come here
the children are my priests
freeing me from the shackles of myself.
They don’t know
how they change me
one moment at a time
how they snap me back
into what matters.
And so I come here week after week
and hope that my prayers
are answered.
– Dedicated to the kids in King County Juvenile Detention that I have had the privilege to write poetry with.
morning
The other day I fell in love with morning
with cool dark air turning light,
with the quiet ferns and waking birds,
with the departing moon
and the rising sun.
I fell in love with oatmeal,
brown sugar sweetness,
the miraculous explosion of tart cranberries
against the solid, smooth grains
With the way a hard-boiled egg gives way
to pressure,
it’s shell cracking under my thumb
like a round desert of dried clay.
I fell in love with hot tea,
steam curling upwards in dissipating tendrils
spicy heat sending cascading rivers of warmth
into my body.
I sat before my breakfast
and wept
from being in love with the world
rather than afraid of it.