Lent and Lament

I was reminded of my commitment to this blog today when Google reminded me it was time to renew my internet domain, so I wanted to take a minute to thank you again for your readership and renew the opportunity to read! 

Over the past few months I have funneled most of my creative writing pursuits into poetry, per my last post. While this has siphoned off a bit of the energy to create longer posts - maybe to your relief - I want to share where my heart and mind have been. 

The follow poem was not written for Lent, but I think it has a just place in this season. It was written rather in a state of lament over the loss of human lives, specifically black lives, and my need to recognize these losses as needing public mourning. My black brothers and sisters, as well as other brothers and sisters of color are often cast outside of the Kin-dom of God for white Western understandings of it; passively, ignorantly, or aggressively, but cast-out nonetheless. 

When a people is separate from the whole of humanity for so long, we humans collectively become bitter toward one another. Something is missing. Communion. But, even when we are rejoined, or the idea of reconciliation is considered, we react upon this bitterness with defensiveness, critique, and stubbornness. We might hate how things have been, but we as beings within stasis are used to remaining stable, remaining the same. How can we challenge stasis with the needs of equity? How can we get to where we could be, when we are stuck where we know we shouldn't be? How can we practice the necessary rite of mourning, in a society confused by its activities?

When God's people of the Old Testament were a-wandering through the land that was certainly not the Promised Land, they knew - keenly - that they were not where they could or should be. And, they became bitter. They wanted to be joined with the land once again, as their first ancestors were in the time of Eden. They wanted to be reconciled to God, the god who made Land, and could allow it flourish. 

Seeing God's people in a fluster, God acted out - in Creativity. God called upon the People to do absurd things in order to show God's absurd love. Two stories catch my attention: Mara and Meribah. At Mara, God challenges the Hebrew nation to drink from a pool of bitterness, made sweet by the simple toss of a stick into the well. At Meribah, God allows even the frustrated striking of a rock to bring forth a refreshing stream to nourish the People. God meets the People where they are at, even when they know they are not where they could or should be. 

I recognize this space of placelessness or purposelessness as mournful. We want to be and to do as humans. We want a great work. When that great work cannot be made manifest, we get aggravated. We are at a loss. And there, in that great loss - of a person, of a place, of a thing - that is where God, Abundance-from-the-Void, meets us. 

Here is my meditation in a poem called "lachryphagy," a scientific word which means "the behavior of drinking tears for nourishment," a behavior known to be present in some moths and flies. What can we learn from lament?



***

: : lachryphagy
: : the Founts of Marah and Meribah


A snow of delicate condolences accumulates,
stitching a shroud of solace atop downturned heads,
as a shared loss makes our dimmed domes
a range of memorial impasses.
Stolen and steeled into the firmament,
mourning is hope, heavied, and circumstance cements us into place.

To remember, or distract, we light funeral pyres aloft
but like gestural satire, schizophrenic are the flame’s dances,
sharp and bright, yet unclear and undecided, as we:
to labor our feet for a life celebrated
or mellow our minds,
to meditate on a justice anticipated?

Memories make warmth in this storm of uncertainty,
coercing your cooled, stilled shoulders
past their posture of self-preservation:
a subtle shiver, a conceding shake,
a questioned quiver, a compounding quake,
and the summit starts to move.

Sadness something like anger scales your trembling facade,
razing an unready edifice
with the blaring burden of obvious bitterness,
rending the shroud’s pure safeguard,
where you curled, cloaked in defensible discontent
as reality etches a stairwell down into the valley
of embodied acknowledgment.

The rock was struck,
and the waters poured forth,
and the people, and the beasts
were pleased.

Where snow froze, rain follows further.
I see in you a medicine meant for all of us.

Pools of revelation gather in the oracle’s temple,
your eyes amass tides as salty as the sea
before making their lamenting descent
down the graven face of your holy mountain.

Each new tributary from the hill’s head,
hides a harbinger to happiness and ecstatic release,
whether through endorphin or endeavoring,
the rite of grief will gift gladness, if let flow.

In the flooding of the heights,
head, heart, and hands are washed clean
by vernal conversion; crystals to catalyst,
guilt-built dams to growth-giving inundation.

Once revered, the held headwaters can host
a harvest of new relevance,
not dumb nor proud in its business,
but intent on making riven the rock called reticent.

What ignorance would call innocence or naivete,
confused by the choreography of a danced dirge,
a lament cannot be sent on still feet and set times,
but moved to motion by remembering mouths and intent cries.

To lose is to learn; to forget: regret.
We grow by going down, dwelling upon what’s gone,
precipitating our prayers into sullen streams,
fording into the shallows of our sorrow,
committing to our concave consequences,
and cupping a mindful of commemorations
that we can be nourished by our mourning
and be tasked once again with the mending of the mundane.