i.

at the site of myself aging

magma boils below the ground

churning in the earthiness of flesh

awaiting the pressures fo fear

eager to blow through the bones

of skeletons hid in the hold

in dark tunnels of the heart

to destroy the peace in the park

ii.

the battle-ground is greening

flowering with the rose of Sharon

towering before the Philistines

whose pebbles are vehicles of hope.

blood will spill out freely

like beer at a tail-gating party

and will pour into national chambers

where white cells tremble from the cold

iii.

a soldier squats like a child at toilet

struggling to rise like thalidomide at play

fears slicing into his wholeness

amputating his integrity and grace.

physicians mold his prostheses

as he reviews the movies of his mind

wishing down the shadows of hist'ry

and longing the embodiment of love

*Today is my mother's 97th birthday.

*Today, President Lincoln emancipated the slaves in the District of Columbia (1862).

I continue to weep.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Both means and obstacles, words lie as much as they tell the truth.

  -Dead truth is worse than error; at least you can react against error.

  -The word of Scripture or the word of someone who proclaims the Gospel anew, the same yet different, reaches us with body and soul intact.  There is the shock of a superabundant life with its burden of enigma and its secret, which draws us toward the risk of adventure.

  -It's impossible to cheat reality.  Reality will always take its revenge.  The abandonment of the Church, indifference, the much-publicized religious crisis, are undoubtedly related to the new structures of society which no longer have credibility.  It's not that there is less faith but that sociological conditions are changing.  That's true, but to an incalculable degree those structures are  the crystalization of our illusions and lies.

  -To become aware of the abyss that separates words and reality, to live with that pain, is to pray and thereby reduce the split, regardless of the poverty of words.

  -...it's not verbalization that best brings people together, but something more obscure and vital, a breath, an aspiration, a movement, gestures, that make people who have opinions recognize each other.  Even among those who use the same vocabulary and the same ideas, if that quality doesn't exist, a declaration of community is only a veil of illusion.

  -Since people are not always inhabited by the superabundant life of faith and the joy that goes with it, they surrender all the more quickly to the urge to convince others.

  -The thrust of the Word can only be borne in the hollow of consciousness, without any detour.  Loves offer no explanations or proofs.  It takes you by surprise, disorganizing before recreating; it invents it own path, the path of communion.