museum pieces

we black men curse

we groan

we snarl

we hate

and in anger's passionate heat

buy guns

to air fate

pointing their barrels

at black one's to shoot

a loony coot

dead 

from the sky

we pass our lives

as zombies dying

dying without hope 

for tomorrow's tomorrows

as our destruction looms near

and we grin from our cages

from museum display cases

as objects for extinction 

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -If we are to believe he(Jesus) is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

  -...love that is forced is of course not love at all.

  -Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks.  Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt, even as Jesus  on the Cross doubted.

  -But if we have no proof that he is alive, we have many witnesses, two thousand years of them, and yet we have more than that.

  -The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.

Milking

I pulled, I yanked

squeezed hard and soft

both hands together

sometimes oned

toward the impatient pail

awaiting in silence

for some trickle as proof

that I drew milk

milk from a teat

Now those long years have past

I, growing old and grey

have learned quite late

the secret of the task:

I never, occasionally

patted her ass

*I am a joyful sinner.  I am not the first nor am I the last but I am a joyful sinner.

*We raise children to let them go.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the noblest ideas that men have had - ideas about love and freedom and justice - have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for foolish ends.  Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.

  -The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only...the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal.  But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and our imagination - if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next -  what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hand of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.  This is what the stories about Jesus' coming back to life means, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men can kill him.

  -If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

manure

the ordure in trough and pen

and other feeding things

is sharp smelling squish

barefoot farmer children

press their toes between

it's fodder for the plants

that color and bejewel our days

a meal for varied gardens

spawning rations for creature needs

this, the offering of all beasts

holds a lesson for our lives:

the cross of our human living

is manure for our spiritual spine

*The problem with/for Jesus is that we have made him "a religion" instead of someone we follow.

*One never kills the baby because someone else may abort it

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...the storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning - that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere.

  -...all that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of a an eyelid or the tone of a voice.

  -...nothing is entirely black, you know.  Not even the human heart.