One Year

Painting by Julia Watkins

Here we go ‘round the prickly pear, full circle needing prayer

Ashes to molasses, dust to suckling star dust

Sing your celebration, don’t compensate for your salvation

Only to look upon Creation and see what you must:

Jesus smiling down from the cross, where you nailed him to cut your loss

‘Let me live’ He implores with like-water eyes

But your heart desires the world’s somersault, each revelation sounding, “God’s fault”

I see your dizzied regrets wishing to uncarve lines

‘Take me back to Alamogordo, that apache sunset, oh Lord O’—

… Mercy you fear just like climate change

If only you knew what could be felt, the soft warm glow when shadows melt:

You won’t find the rude awakening on a hidden page

Still you sweep away your chores to relish in Proulx metaphors

Embroidering a dream, hiding from the sun

But in the age of the absurd, brocaded vestment is the word

I offer not a secret, but the opposite of one.

August rainbows shower the illusions, shards from the sky cut deep contusions

Into the black dragon’s gilt indigo lips

From the gauntlet of the source of lies, an orogeny of alibis

Now through which the blood of repentance slips

Onto a canvas colored by this swirling orb, infinite fractals of life fully absorbed

Yet you prefer your homesick angel prison

Built by comrades of the false gods, who say it is against all odds

That you are already free and forgiven;

That I nourished my seedling, taught you the ways of kneeling needling,

Love for your neighbor and how to end poverty;

That I transplanted you among the Tibetan cedars, showed you Christ within their leaders;

This deceit only mocks spiritual sovereignty;

Saying Easter does not resurrect Jesus, life begins and ends as do all musical pieces.

The chameleon beguiles with his shifty dance

On swaying bamboo tops of Kunming, faint by the motion you are left wond’ring

How you got caught up in this vile romance

Wherein a daughter’s birth is mere currency for mirth;

And the May baby’s deliverance for death’s sake alone;

While blessed pregnancy exists for pain, the conversion of the soul for worldly gain;

I drew a rose to have it beaten by a stone.

I offer you this, my beloved:

Their bars and bricks, their voice and conventions, are for their partition, and they lie behind it.  Not you, the ragdolls, Q’s Angels, those who chew the bitter ginseng root, those called Mr. Pitiful, those reproached for poisoning food by forgetting to pray, that beautiful, beautiful pilgrim church on earth, those who hear the cock’s third crow, those who hear Padre Benedetto’s words and let human understanding evaporate so that divine understanding may condense, thaw, and run-off; you, Sister Isosceles, who, worn and torn, at risk and attacked, have sacrificed yourself since 2012; you who seek the omnipresent and love my name, are rising from the violent city and jumping off the oaky-doky swing from human ignorance to human innovation and back again.  Blog and be blogged, go find each other, precious children of God.

© 2016, Amaya Engleking

For my one year blog anniversary I decided to write a poem including every one of my 77 blog titles, or a part of every title from the year, beginning November 15, 2015.