Poetry in Prayer: Elfchen #2

Late fall azalea blooms

The Elfchen or Elevenie form, is a German-inspired poem of eleven words in five lines, with 1, 2, 3, 4 words, then 1 word again for the fifth and last line.

Jesus,
Your love
Holds me fast
Eternally to abide in
You.

Branch
Of David
From Jesse’s root
Return soon we pray
Amen.


Jeremiah 33:15
In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

John 15:9
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.

1 Corinthians 16:22
Maranatha. Our Lord, come!


Late fall azaleas for Cee's FOTD (Flower of the Day)

In the Pink

Azalea

Profusion of pink

Distant memory of spring

As summer’s gold wanes

For Cee's FOTD, September 7, 2021:See the gorgeous red zinnias on Cee's site.
Flower of the Day Challenge (FOTD).  
"Please feel free to post every day or when you you feel like it.  
Don’t forget that my FOTD challenge accepts gardens, leaves and berries as well as flowers."  

This Day

Psalm 104: 10-13
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills;
they give drink to every beast of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.

For Cee's FOTD, July 13, 2021

A Red, Red Rose (Burns)

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee well, my only Luve
And fare thee well, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

Robert Burns (1759–1796)

For Cee’s Flower of the Day, June 11, 2021

The Accidental Rose

Seeing a rose, I once said that we stand out like that, red on green, and you reply, tongue-in-cheek, you mean like an ambulance at 3 AM in a Mississippi swamp and I shut up, crushed, like you’d said we were an accident that had been waiting to happen, as if crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end, just a screeching of brakes, a clang of metal, the jolting of bones, and then the long drawn out police report and insurance claims, a ledger of rights and wrongs, and the spindrift pages in the moonlit night where my heart spills and the nightingale vies with a shrike impaled on a thorny bush that ought to have a bloom, a rose, while someone, no one, looks for a medic to resuscitate the dead in an ambulance at 3 AM.


For Cee's FOTD 
and dVerse's Prosery where Merril asks us to use a line from a Jo Harjo poem, “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end,” to write a 144-word piece of prose. Click on Mr. Linky and join in!

Nature Abstracted

Sometimes you turn away your gaze for a moment
the light too strong for your eyes
then look back and the world’s changed
into something sharper, more beautiful
something urgent and pressing
but sometimes into something indecipherable
that doesn’t belong in this time, this place
but to a sentient landscape
to a prehistoric race
who knew what they saw
and understanding,
took flight.

Continue reading “Nature Abstracted”

Santa in Civitas

Envision the perfect gathering, would you, of Christmas love and camaraderie spread profusely into every inch and corner of your assembly? Imagine, if you can, you as Santa clad in Christmas cheer greeting one and all in bubbly abandon and not a frown of discontent or “Bah, humbug!” encountered. I dare say it’s more likely that your perfect picture will give way to this: Santa in Civitas in the Aristotlean sense, that is, Santa in the ultimate natural community surrounded by the sweet, the rotten, the bittersweet, the sour, the tasteless and the cloying.

IMG_1254

Continue reading “Santa in Civitas”