Benedicere

A New Year's Day blessing

May your home always be too

small to hold all your friends.

May your heart remain ever supple,

fearless in the face of threat,

jubilant in the grip of grace.

May your hands remain open,

caressing, never clenched,

save to pound the doors

of all who barter justice

to the highest bidder.

May your heroes be earthy,

dusty-shoed and rumpled,

hallowed but unhaloed,

guiding you through seasons

of tremor and travail, apprenticed

to the godly art of giggling

amid haggard news and

portentous circumstance.

May your hankering be

in rhythm with heaven’s,

whose covenant vows a dusty

intersection with our own:

when creation’s hope and history rhyme.

May hosannas lilt from your lungs:

God is not done;

God is not yet done.

All flesh, I am told, will behold;

will surely behold.

--Ken Sehested

 Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard.

"Er, aren't you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?" said her mother, who'd never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about.

"No, Mum, I'm supposed not to," said Tiffany, still scrubbing.

"But can't you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?...I thought you just had to wave your hands about."

"That works," said Tiffany, "but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush."

--Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

Too Late?

By the time we arrive at the cliffside

to watch the sunset, the darkness

has already come. But because

of the ink-ish sky, we see thousands

of yellow lights glitter across the harbor.

And moonlight on the water makes

the blackened surface shine. How often

do I think I’m too late, only to find I have

arrived at just the right moment,

the moment in which there is a beauty

beyond the one I knew to wish for.

Like how, when I thought it was too late

to forgive, forgiveness arrived with its

soft and generous hands. Like how when

I thought I was too late to love, love

bloomed like a sunset, radiant and blazing,

and stayed, the way sunsets never do.

Like how I believed I was here to adore the light,

I came to learn how exquisite, how

lavish, how astonishing, the dark.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Before I Read the News

How courageous can I be to let all of life in?

                  —Leslie Odom, Jr.  on The Hamilcast with Gillian Pensavalle

I press both hands

to my chest, then

look at the trees

and the road outside.

I imagine the world

beyond what I see,

cities, continents, space,

then close my eyes

to open.

I listen to what is here,

attune to the silence

that holds up all sound.

Feel my heart beat

against my palm.

Hello heart, I say.

Hello heart.

If I am to read the news,

I want to invite not only

my head but my body.

Want to receive it as if

I am river and sky

as much as I am human.

The ache of the news

is no less great,

perhaps greater, but

I know I am not alone.

In the barren branches

of my fear, the chickadees

come to sing.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer