statement, bishop mariann budde
The President just used a Bible and one of the churches of my diocese as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for. To do so, he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers in riot gear to clear the church yard.
I am outraged.
The President did not pray when he came to St. John’s; nor did he acknowledge the agony and sacred worth of people of color in our nation who rightfully demand an end to 400 years of systemic racism and white supremacy in our country.
We in the Diocese of Washington follow Jesus in His Way of Love. We aspire to be people of peace and advocates of justice. In no way do we support the President’s incendiary response to a wounded, grieving nation. In faithfulness to our Savior who lived a life of non-violence and sacrificial love, we align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others through the sacred act of peaceful protest.
Copyright reserved, Mariann Edgar Budde. Recorded for personal use only.
Which texts
The ones written by our fathers
Those written on the body
Scars, inked on leaves
Curvatures of earth pocked and scarred
Letters blown away by breath and murmurs
and murmurations over our heads and deep
in our bones
Those sacred texts
The story of my life as I stretch, and bend, and touch, and open
—
Solidarity
Fades
When taking steps
Restrict us
More than expresses
Our care
—
The red hot tender
Awareness of the other
The inevitability of gravity
Your turn to run
Falling bodies through space
Glowing brightly
Owing to the death of stars
Never afraid to fight
Through the collected
Detritus of past living
Surviving, ever in potential,
We reach up, past our roots,
To find the light
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
after crossing a lazy tributary of the great river, the hills become soft as a baby’s belly, and nature provides her fruits with only a simple gesture of gratitude. this is here. you have seen big time in the distance, and its towering face, and you have heard stories of its glamour, of the highest masters’ seed-crystal at its heart. we remain in the hills and pilgrimage to the big time mountain on the day when shadows leave to drink the seed-crystal’s light. we return to the big time mountain on the longest night, as the sun rises from its misty brow. the shadows need be shown their original home, else become enchanted by the long-night’s convincing darkness.
we people here are travelers, though we do not move beyond the hills, the great river, the big time mountain. the terrain unfolds with the silver grace of night, as she moves from crescent to globe. the terrain unfolds with the wax and wane of shadow and light. the terrain unfolds through the long days of work in the sun, and the short by fire.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Take January’s advice. Stack wood.
Weather inevitably turns cold, and you
make fires to stay healthy. Study
the grand metaphor of this yearly work.
Wood is a symbol for absence. Fire,
for your love of God. We burn form
to warm the soul. Soul loves winter
for that, and accepts reluctantly the
comfort of spring with its elegant,
proliferating gifts. All part of the
plan: fire becoming ash becoming
garden soil becoming mint, willow, and
tulip. Love looks like fire.
Feed yourself into it. Be the fireplace and
the wood. Bravo, for this metallurgy
that makes a needle from an iron ingot.
Calm fire now: for the moth a window;
for you, an armor of roses! Pharoah
dissolves like yogurt in water. Moses
comes to the top like oil. Fine Arabians
carry royalty. Nags, the sacks of dried
dung. Language is an annoying clatter
in the mill of meaning. A silent river
turns the millstone. The word-grains get
noisily dumped in the tray, pulverized
under the stone like gossip. Let this
poem be thus ground. Let me go
back to the lovefire that refines the
pure gold of my friend, Shamsuddin.
Copyright reserved, Coleman Banks. Recorded for personal use only.
fixion, 5 mai, interlace [02020]
With distance, now, and then, those years of frenzied mayhem, I see something that then I could not.
It took the quarantine to teach me, and it took my readiness to learn. What feels for me like a timeless vantage point of ages, in which I uncovered the secret gate, was to others a willful, wanton imposition. An annoyance, or affront. Solitude alone will not break you from your bonds. You have to be ready for freedom.
I see now that you have to choose your world. Not in the sense of mindset or of outlook or of view, but in the sense of actual spacetime splits and causeways.
By late January of 2020, I was living again in Austin, and had been for a year. I had always missed the hills and rivers, and at last they’d drawn me back. When shelter in place was declared in March, I fell back on my slim savings. I’d laid the foundations of my pantry in February, being too aware of the Johns Hopkins map. And, together with Franklin Pick the Fifth of Nine, my cat, we took to the attic.
I read, and I slept, and I baked sourdough bread, and I dreamt so much chaos, and of an odd girl named Ruth, who seemed to be from another world, or another story. In a dream Ruth showed me how to go to the attic of the attic, or at root of the deepest stone inside a mountain, where nothing can ever be upside down, as it is all made of circles.
That was where the deepfold was revealed to me, and the waygates leading to it, and the means not just of choosing which kind of life you’ll live, but of navigating the manifold worlds to live there.
The pathway through the deepfold narrows further still, from here, as I drift and wend my way further from those unready, or unwilling to try and find it.
But I still love you, from those days when we burnt through our youth like a fever. And I want to bring you with me, if I can.
So that’s where we go from here. Time is short, and growing shorter by the day.
Time to find another way.
Based on a text by Heath Rezabek as part of interlace [02020]
great barrier, barbara kingsolver
The cathedral is burning. Absent flame or smoke,
stained glass explodes in silence, fractal scales
of angel damsel rainbow parrot. Charred beams
of blackened coral lie in heaps on the sacred floor,
white stones fallen from high places, spires collapsed
crushing sainted turtle and gargoyle octopus.
Something there is in my kind that cannot love
a reef, a tundra, a plain stone breast of desert, ever
quite enough. A tree perhaps, once recomposed
as splendid furniture. A forest after the whole of it
is planed to posts and beams and raised to a heaven
of earnest construction in the name of Our Lady.
All Paris stood on the bridges to watch her burning,
believing a thing this old, this large and beautiful
must be holy and cannot be lost. And coral temples
older than Charlemagne suffocate unattended,
bleach and bleed from the eye, the centered heart.
Lord of leaves and fishes, lead me across this great divide.
Teach me how to love the sacred places, not as one
devotes to One who made me in his image and is bound
to love me back. I mean as a body loves its microbial skin,
the worm its nape of loam, all secret otherness forgiven.
Love beyond anything I will ever make of it.
Copyright reserved, Barbara Kingsolver. Recorded for personal use only.
…it’s like this. Sometimes, when you’ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you’ll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you’re out of breath and have to stop–and still the street stretches away in front of you. That’s not the way to do it.
You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.
That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that’s how it ought to be.
And all at once, before you know it, you find you’ve swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what’s more, you aren’t out of breath. That’s important, too…”
Copyright reserved, Michael Ende. Recorded for personal use only.
Exhausted.
I want a sleep permit,
forgiveness to rest for hours,
without even dreaming
the light straw of a small dream.
I want what before life
was the deep sleep of the species,
the grace of a state.
Seed.
Much more than roots.”
Copyright reserved, Adélia Prado. Recorded for personal use only.
highway maintenance, monicka kowalczyk-kroll
Last night I took my chisel, fox bone fine
and chipped away at cobblestones,
freed the holloways of our dreaming
from their claggy coating of hot bitumen and
compact concrete blankets.
Ripped with scissors sharp as badgers teeth
the ribbons of hard roads corseting soft flesh,
and saw how the depressed and flattened swathes
of meadow grass, rising like dough,
with the sweet dank smell of a ponies flinching skin
released from the saddle,
found their true lintel of vast sky again;
each tussock again a hassock for my prayers.
The straitjacketed waterways and
panicked silted rivers I left to the ministries
of the beavers and their mosaic art –
and the moon found a million new homes to bathe in.
I dismantled bridges, made us crawl the sides of fallen trees
like slow beetles and remember holy longing,
I gouged out street lights like splinters from puckered flesh
And scribbled out the false punctuation of
Fences and gates and barbed wire,
angry slashes across our thought lines
So that the wild creatures could finish their perfect sentences on the land.
Tonight I go out again, with a screech owl claw needle,
there are frayed edges to be soldered,
a golden joinery.
Copyright reserved, Monicka Kowalczyk-kroll. Recorded for personal use only.
in blackwater woods, mary oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
Copyright reserved, Mary Oliver. Recorded for personal use only.
History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Copyright reserved, Estate of Seamus Heaney. Recorded for personal use only.
a noiseless patient spider, walt whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
I
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Copyright reserved, Estate of T. S. Eliot. Recorded for personal use only.
Learn patience. Watch the quiet-moving hours
Slowly beneath hard winter form the spring.
To-day the earth is locked in icy death,
To-morrow, and to-morrow. Dreary boughs
Flaunt their dry leaves in mockery of life.
The ground is adamant; no juices run;
The world is chained in silent hopelessness.
But patience! By a hair’s breadth momently
The whirling globe turns nearer to the sun.
And patience! By a hair’s breadth momently
The iron earth relaxes into life.
Slow drop by drop the sluggish current starts
Through nature’s myriad veins. The glittering sky
Takes on insensibly a milder light.
The meadow softens. Through the waiting woods
Delicious thrills anticipate the spring.
For He, the Life, the omnipresent Life,
The Life that beats at every door of death,
The Life that broods in every sky, and spreads
In ceaseless widening waves to every shore,
Has filled the world too full for any noise
Or bluster of His working,—nought to do,
In any corner of His universe,
But live and love and be the God He is!
So shall I live when I am one with Him,
So shall I work in all serenity.
So shall I face the cold or any heat,
The storm or drought, and live my life through all.
So shall I know the shallowness of sound,
The majesty of calm; and so at last
Become co-worker of God’s patient years.
the mystery will drive us into madness or into grace, but until then we can believe none of it.
i met you, sister, in the auto bio photo room, dressed in greens that lifted up and out from every seam a stream of colored light, and it was clearer than memory. i met you there, even though we are half a galaxy away from here. i climbed the stairs, the stars helped me there. i looked for you and found you, sitting in a seat reserved for me, and that’s how i know you aren’t through yet. if you need my voice again, all you need to do is ask.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
manifesto: mad farmer liberation front, wendell berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery any more.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium.
Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion–put your ear close,
and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world.
Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap.
Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark a false trail, the way you didn’t go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Copyright reserved, Wendell Berry. Recorded for personal use only.
creation. unexpectedly, the world changes. my attention has wandered into the absurd, as a new idea or a new awareness shifts and ripples throughout me. your presence. isn’t it amazing that we are all here? just who am i talking to? this is living in solitude, a hundred shifting mirrors. the quicksilver rises. i am looking across a wide playa, and an oasis. it is humbling to remember there are a million of us out here. a million parallel. when i returned to the earth, and looked for you to meet, my bliss became an embarrassment. a history and a legacy that i would rather forget. and so i look for the moment, the moment that cannot be found from looking. the. vast. sky. opens. daylight and night. seven days later, there are longer days and shorter nights. we are spinning ning ning ing spinning spinning around spinning around around spinning around the center and the center and we are spinning around the central sun. time and eternity
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
And she was lying on the floor, feeling it drop out from under her, and all became dark, and she could only feel the cold of metal.
A man lay dying, in a lush meadow of tall grass and flowers, surrounded by woods of tall pine and fir. The sun lit up the leaves and shown through to glow the air green and pulsing. He was lying in a silk dressing robe on a simple hospital gurney, his arm and chest connected to diagnostic and intravenous equipment. And though he slept, he slept unsoundly. His eyes were open. His lips were dry and ridged with chapped skin, and under his eyes were scales of exhaustion.
Ruth stood under the shade on the edge of the meadow and saw the man, and wondered if he had dreams, in his sleep, even if he may be too ill to remember them, or to distinguish them from waking.
Several others were standing around the man, then, in seemingly random positions, and some, from moment to moment, turned around, and walked in circles, or walked away, and into the woods. A woman walked in Ruth’s direction, and then, as she approached, Ruth saw that the woman did not see her, and walked past without any hint of awareness. But Ruth saw that the man always was in the midst of people, who hovered, and stood, or sat, and sometimes broke into argument with one another, before quickly forgetting it. And Ruth, piqued by the sense of invisibility she’d felt from avoiding the woman, slowly walked towards where the man was lying, and where the others were milling.
Indeed no one seemed to see her, or, at least, pay her any notice. She came to within 20 meters of the man, and by then several of the people had walked by her, or had looked in her direction. But at this distance she could see that there were others close to this man who she could not have seen from so far away, as they were small children. One, a boy, sat on the edge of the gurney, holding the mans right hand as he played with colorful playing cards, laid out in rough piles on the mans belly. And a little girl lay curled against the man, the thumb of one hand tucked into her mouth, which were all tucked into the man’s side. And then the boy was sitting in a chair by the mans side, with his eyes closed and the girl was sitting opposite. And then they were back on the gurney with him. And then they were sitting.
Ruth became curious and approached the gurney now, looking intently at the man and the boy and girl, and she saw a third chair at the foot of the bed, as the boy and girl lifted their heads and smiled towards her. She saw that they smiled in her direction and felt that they did not see her, and so she looked behind her only to see no one approach ; no one that she could see. And she heard both of them giggle; they had been smiling at her. And the girl seemed to smile at the chair as well, so Ruth felt she could sit there. She felt a wonderful peace as she sat, and soon realized that all of the people she had seen there were no longer, and the woods were no longer, or the meadow. She and the girl and the boy were sitting in a circle in a luminous room inside a mountain, and at the center, between them, was a miniature tree, rooted in a vase of pearl and silver, adorned with black filigree etchings that were as wondrous as the perfection of the tree it held.
Ruth found herself lost in the magnificence of the tree, as she looked at it, and memorized the lines and curves of it; the life coursing up into its arms and down through its trunk to deepest roots; and she once again saw it: seeing – that the light of the room was coming from it.
She saw the light but then a tree; a tree and then light; light and then a tree.
She felt the floor and the room and she felt her friends, the boy and the girl, sitting in a circle, as if they always had, as they always had, circling the light and surrounded by it, And it filled up her chest and it filled up her heart and it burst from it: and she became the source; and she became the center. And she smiled, sweetly, as she remembered this was a dream, but she felt grateful anyway; she felt it made forgiveness of all kinds of wrongs sensible, and even the deepest grief bearable.
She had not realized her eyes were closed; as she opened them, she found the circle had grown, and there were more friends here than she new to count; from her village and from elsewhere, unknown; young and old; and happily, beyond unimaginably happily, she saw the girl, and the boy, and Quinn. She awoke only with a simple memory, of looking through green curtains, at a clear and sunny sky.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
the peace of wild things, wendell berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Copyright reserved, Wendell Berry. Recorded for personal use only.
Ruth focused on her feet, bare on a luminous floor, warm to her toes, making her curious and so she touched the floor with the pads of her right toes, and pressed in towards the warmth. She wore a simple white night gown, that glowed from the light. And she then pressed the heel of her right foot in towards the floor as well, sensing a magical and ticklish heat rise and caress her foot, and her ankle, and then quickly, her leg, and she pressed with her left foot then. A wonderful warmth and lightness rose up from the floor and filled her legs and her pelvis, and she said, ‘Oh!’ and the warmth filled her chest and her head and it burst out of her heart — And she was lying on the floor, feeling it hold her up, and wrap her in light, and she fell deeply into sleep then, and into dreams.
She walks through the lushest green woodlands glowing and undulating rich and flowing life and in the tall grass of a hidden meadow listening to the soft buzzing patter of crickets through the dark of the deepest reaches of the oceans tasting purest blue and above the reach of air climbing towering mountains within the roots of stone —
Ruth focused on her feet, bare on the luminous floor, warm to her toes, and she planted her feet to feel its support, to feel it holding her up and filling her up with it, until she saw her friends alongside her, also in that room of light in the roots of the mountain, in a circle, and then standing randomly; in a circle and then standing in groups; in a circle and then standing randomly; and she felt the warmth was gone from her and could no longer feel her feet — And she was lying on the floor, feeling it drop out from under her, and all became dark, and she could only feel the cold of metal.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
i walked and walked, through the night streets, alone. the moon was strobing behind branches, shadows… and i found it in the dark, despite myself.
every surface was carved, and of ancient lumber, stained with a dark oil. gilded zoomorphs danced all around the columns and glowed on the massive walls. i walked in through a hidden way, on the east side of the structure, and walked, slowly, around a central space, through endless galleries. the passages were gradually illuminated more, as i walked further in, around, around, towards the center.
there i entered, and all of those i’d followed were there waiting. i felt no longer pursued, but met by all those that had followed. the hall was vast and its ceilings seemed higher than they were in fact. richly colored woven tapestries and silken pillows filled the space. it smelled like the gods had burned their own rare and heavenly herb. its aroma lifted every breath.
as i stood in the center and basked in an incredible light, come from that place and those souls, i awoke. in waking, i remembered that i had been exploring the autobiophotoroom’s court and gardens, just before beginning my walk. it was as if i had done a direct cut, with no transition; as if i had moved from dream to waking and remembered little of the first. but i saw that i could not have gone to one without the other.
in that court i found a wide rectangular space that was apart from the fountains, but within earshot. a very high roof of stone above, framed with columns on two sides. on two sides there were entrances to different chambers of the Room.
i found that space and sat on the cold stone and began to look for the source of light there. a soft blue was coming from somewhere. i noticed that there was an entirely unnoticed opening directly in front of me, as if, while i wasn’t looking, the two walls had nudged apart a little. i leapt up in astonished joy at what i saw. through a new partition, i saw that the building was embraced by the roots of a tall, terraced mountain, wreathed in night-blooming flowers. i looked directly up the side of it, and as i did, i looked into the sky. the moonlight settled on leaves, vines, and fruits as a mist does.
i sat back down and found that i was singing in a voice i knew, but did not know was me. a rush of song came through my heart and through my mouth, to the high hill before me, and what i was seeing, and what i was singing, were the same. and then i found myself walking, and walking, on night streets, alone.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
She felt the mane of a horse with her hands, and under her a strong creature, which was not a horse, she did not know what. She traveled a road; and the road had been long. She was thirsty – thirstier than she ever remembered being. And she looked around at the land, and felt that it was familiar – at least it was a place not unlike the lands to the West of the canyons, but it was not them. She felt that she had been traveling with one other on the road, but she had parted from them, or she could not find them.
As she thought of her – yes, it was her – a girl who I once saw in a dream, ‘A girl I once saw in a dream,’ said Quinn, and he mounted his ride, and then drifted away, across the dry and desolate land of scrags and dust.
The girl was riding alongside Ruth on a horse, that wasn’t a horse, and they were beginning to travel a road; the road would be long, and some of the journey would be difficult – even dangerous. They were not yet certain of what they would find at the end of it. But they had eluded so many dangers already; they had already come so far. But it was the road they had to travel – it was the only road.
She was running then and trying to find the girl. They had to find the road together – there was no other way.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
After leaving their gliders Ruth and Quinn trailed behind Joseph and his attendants, into a modest door inset on the farthest fence wall. It opened into another square, but thriving with growing gardens, fruit trees, and flowing fountains. The path was cobbled in grey ocean stone, their feet tapping flatly as they made their way through. Morning light broke on the top of the fence. Three walls here were of stone, and many-arched, each open; some to small alcoves, and others opened to further reaches of the village. Joseph led them through a low arch, and into a small sitting area, where a long wooden table rested with places already set, and crocks steaming full of breakfast nourishment, and platters spread with cheeses and fruits, and cured meats. The attendants left them here.
‘Sit,’ Joseph said calmly. ‘And please eat. You must be hungry. We will have time enough to talk, once you are refreshed.
Ruth and Quinn sat next to each other on one bench, while Joseph sat across from them, and each dove in to their meal. They were ravished, and in the last stretch of travel, had completely neglected to eat, in the rush of worry, and in the exhaustion and the longing to finally make it home.
Joseph sat quietly with them as they ate, after setting a small work trunk at his place. He opened the trunk’s top, on a hinge, which revealed a set of small drawers in the enclosure. He pulled a small square cloth from the top drawer, and set it in front of the trunk. Ruth, once mildly sated, could see him begin work on assembling a small fetish of herbs, and feathers, and stone. He pulled a bottle from the trunk, and sprinkled a dusty substance all over his bundle, and then dipped his water glass over his hands, to catch a handful. He sprinkled the water over his bundle, and then took it whole, holding it as one would hold a dead rabbit, or a captured moth. Ruth caught his eyes, and he flashed a smile, and closed his eyes.
He held his had up to his mouth and Ruth saw him whisper small words into it. ‘So be it!’ He said aloud.
Joseph looked around the table then to see that all were finished eating, and then said, ‘My dear friends, thank you for returning to us so quickly. You’ve witnessed something terrifying, I’m sure. You did the right thing, call it in as you did, to look into it as you did.
‘There is still much to be determined. But I can tell you this already,” he paused. ‘Something has occurred in the Sky beyond what you have seen. The fall which you witnessed was only a sign of something more, something much more. But Rebecca has now seen simply through the keyhole of the door to the truth. She is journeying still, even as she has since you, Quinn, called. She will journey still through the day.
‘Meanwhile, please, tell me what you have seen. Please tell me what you have learned. Your tools no longer work, you say? I will gather your words to this Machika, here,’ he raised the fetish, ‘And it will be given to the fire. That will call all we need to us.
And so,they each looked at one another, neither sure or eager to start. Quinn wiped the last of his breakfast from his plate with a palm of bread. “We had only just awoken. So, it was perhaps an hour and half before I called Rebecca. Jedah, and Cooper and I were working in the kitchen – and Ruth spotted it first…
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Jars of springwater are not enough anymore.
Take us down to the river.
The face of peace, the sun itself.
No more the slippery, cloudlike moon.
Give us one clear morning after another,
and the one whose work remains unfinished
who is our work as we diminish,
idle, though occupied, empty, and open.
Copyright reserved, Coleman Banks. Recorded for personal use only.
walking along a grass path, edges golden strings plucking into the blue air, the bright blue air, to the androgyny room, where the flowers grow inside out and upside down, in gel mediums tempered with powdered, earthen, pots and baked vessels, all in rows, high, against the red wall.
he is standing at the gate, holding the felled branches woven into it. a worn edge along the top, where countless others have held it. the hands have polished the woven-branch gate to a deep and dulled brown. elsewise it is lichen-green bark, and ancient moss. the color of wet roots.
his hand clutches the gate tight. he is looking into the air, across the wide sea of golden grass, across to the horizon. a golden wave rolls along the soft hills before him from a gentle breeze, and he sees it before it reaches him. from the horizon a breeze rolls toward him.
dry, still air, hardly moving about him. and silence. and the quiet brush, at his feet.
the wave approaches, and pushes before it air, air around him and above him, pushes below it and around the brush and between legs and hands and swirls around his neck, his hair blows in it and his ears, his lips, kiss the breeze as it passes. he passes through the gate. he walks along a path, just wide enough for footfall, tamped down among tall, golden grass that reminds him of the strings of a lyre, or the lines of a page.
the room is upside down, but the flowers only grow that way when he squints real hard. stacked against a high, blood-red wall are countless earthen vessels, of as many sizes and shapes.
This work by Michael Gomez is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0