because he lives: in memoriam

I cannot bear her honesty,
she is too much;
too much and not enough.
I hate her.
There are many words I hear and read,
but it is these I remember.
Am I just noise, lost in the wailing of the sea?
Am I just empty words, fluttering in the void?
Is it true,
can it be,
that there are other words, defining me?
Is it true that some roots go deeper than my grief,
my doubt,
my rage?
Is there something more than my pain?
I can not tell
But I remember a few words, now,
slipping under my shroud and gently touching my heart,
because this is how you rekindle a flame,
this is how a dead heart starts beating:
Love, and nothing else.
Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Grandma Struck told me those words,
accompanied by yellow peeps
and fierce hugs.
And the Toays,
with kindness
and eyes that made a shy child feel safe.
So safe, that when I left a church
that had wrung my spirit dry,
When I fell
and fell
and fell
I never forgot those words.
And tonight, right now, I know this:
Because He lives,
I can face tomorrow.
And when I doubt it,
I see the words, written in love across the sky,
across the face of the world,
across my own fragile, beating heart.

Sarah

I know you thought
that God must have forsaken you.
On the nights when the sheets grew cold,
when your husband lay beside the other woman and did not get up,
did you question if the man God gave you had forgotten?
Did you wonder what you had done
in all of your virtuous life
to deserve this?
Did you shake your fist towards the heaven?
Or did you weep like the nightingale greeting spring?
And when the men with shining faces
told your cold womb it would bear a child,
did you laugh in their faces
and tremble within?
Did you remember the cost of hope,
taste the bitterness of all your wasted dreams?
Did you remember the child who was not your child,
the child you cast out in fear?
Oh, barren daughter, did you ever dream of this?
That in all the doubt and rage and emptiness,
it was not a child you sought,
but a King?

Untitled

I write when I break.
When I'm afraid of who I am.
Because when the words are stripped away,
I am terrified of the empty space they leave behind.
It is the horror of my dreams
and of my waking nightmare
to be along with myself.
Because I wonder:
when no one needs me,
when I have nothing value to give anyone,
will there be anything in me left to love?

Barren

 His.
The darkness of her soul
bleeds into mine
bleedsbleedsbleeds
until it is a river,
and I am nothing but the torn riverbank,
lost in the flood.
I can see nothing,
feel nothing.
She consumes me,
and I am hers.
Hers.
Does he know that when he laughs
I forget to hate him?
Does he realize that he will be
my salvation someday?
Does he forget that I am closer to hell
than to heaven,
that I can feel the flames licking at my heart,
and it is everything I am not to fall, lifeless?
I think he does,
but when I look at his eyes, the way they smile,
I see something that breaks my heart:
I think he loves me anyway.

Both of Us

The firelight danced on the lines and shadows of her face, and her eyes shone fiercely.

And it was then that Richard knew he would follow her to the ends of the earth