TURNINGS

Steel skies ease
Into cerulean
White-gold light.
Aims north
Painting
Muddy ground
Into grassy fields
Like a Disney cartoonist
With a magic brush.
We wait
The unfolding
Peeking
At chartreuse shoots
Pulsing through dirt.
Life reborn
At our fingertips.

Winds dance
With the perfumed narcissus
Sending winter’s mustiness
Heavenward.

Seeds sown in hidden places
Create vivid landscapes
Manifesting tares and fruit.
Unnourished,
Weeds become husks
Devoid of life
While fruit,
Cultivated with tears
Grows strong,
Reseeding the earth
With hope.

STIRRING OF SOULS

 

 

Drums pulse
Through the night dark.
I close my eyes,
Feel the smoothness of cotton sheets
With bare toes,
Grieving for the woman,
Children, parents
Of the man whose heart stopped
At 5:03 a.m.
When the sun was
Still east of the mountains
And the moon hiding
Behind the monoliths
That brood over the valley.
The pulse of the drums
Concusses the night winds
Plays in my mind
Like a heartbeat
From the earth.
A matatu accident
Was the whisper
In the market.
Flipping when a tire blew
It rained people over the roadway
And into the ditches.
Sleep is elusive
As the drum’s song
Haunts the night hours,
Throbs during the day,
Will continue until
Samuel is buried
With his fathers
In the hollow of ground
Where monkeys play.
Hide and seek.

My Father Thought Sideways

My father thought sideways. It happens. Probably stemmed from the shrapnel imbedded in his head on a hillside in Italy. March. In a dismal rain. 1945 proved a momentous year for my father. Invalided home as the war was ending. Brain surgery. Newborn. A boy. Moving with wife and baby. Restarting college courtesy of the G.I Bill. I came along when the dust had settled and the poetry began to flow again.

It was the poetry that cascaded through my childhood like the rapids along the Columbia before man belted the river with concrete. My earliest memories are words rippling together. We tiptoed through the house because his ever-present headaches raged. Heads weren’t created to have metal plates inserted. I don’t know if his vibrated but first sopranos in the church choir and the concert violinist next door made him wince. I was five when an office was created in the attic on the opposite side of the house from the wild-eyed boy next door and his yappy dog. They drove Dad to Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse. By the time our Julliard trained neighbor, Mrs. Gilkey was across the fence, Dad spent his mornings marinating words in his dust-green aerie.

Beyond Dad’s office was a door leading to the real attic. Where suitcases, trunks, boxes, and pipes nestled in floaty insulation. Don’t sneeze! Don’t step off the wooden two by eights that held the house together.

We crawled on rafters to avoid falling through the ceiling to our bedrooms, terrified that each knee wobble would bring us to the edge of doom. And we showed off the space to visiting cousins who sweated with fear as they followed us to Dad’s old army trunk. The one tucked to the right of the door and wedged under an eave. The paint had faded from green to the color of mud, grass and blood stirred with silver rain. We’d lift the lid and wait. Fingers eager to explore palpated the contents. Dad’s brown officers cap usually came out first because it resided on top. Kids would put it on, oldest to youngest. In a hushed silence the boy cousins would stare at Dad’s helmet. The one with the shrapnel hole to the right of center.

“Can we touch it?” they’d always ask. My brother would gingerly roll it from the far back corner then reverently lift it for them to stick their fingers into the jagged edge. They’d turn it over, suck in their breaths and stare at the red-brown of the dried blood.

My brother has the helmet, now. I don’t want to know where he placed it. When I close my eyes I still see the attic and the shadows as if something remains hidden in the dark.

         THE HELMET

            A thin white scar
Mars my father’s
Forehead.
Shrapnel
Imbedded
Skin, bone,
Vessel
Among the cedars
In Italy
He lay
In the cold
March
Wind
As
Light
Rain
Washed
His blood
Into a
Spring
Damp
Ground.
His helmet
Lies
Dust covered
In the attic
My cousins
Stick their fingers in
Probe
The jagged-edged hole
Tears grow
In my throat.

                                               Written for Dad

 

 

Spreading of the Skies~Job 37

RIFT

Sharpened
By millennia,
Furrowed
By torrents,
You claw the earth’s crust
From Madagascar
To the Red Sea.

Squint-eyed,
I peer
Into the equatorial blaze
Where dust devils
Churn red volcanic soil.

In the middle distance,
Cool, thick-shouldered
Longonot rises
Death stalks
On a narrow path;
Ears tuned to lion sighs.

Bleached land seas
Roil over the valley.
South,
Through the heat haze;
Shimmering Mt. Margaret,
Blue skirted Ngong Hills,
Kiss the sky
Forever.

 Fragments of Eternity, Memories of Africa

                                                     From Unpublished Poetry

Wanderlust

All families have stories.
Ours drift from continent to continent
Stops in North America, Breezes through Asia,
Lingers in Africa, Tours Europe,
And returns.
We wandered purposefully
Not called, Sent.
Seeking people,
Longing for everlasting love,
We hold hands with the dying,
Share water with the thirsty,
Pray for hearts wounded by indifference.
Point the way to the true healer
The peacemaker, the lover of souls.

 

 

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Viumbe Vyote Vya Mungu Wetu Na Mfalme Wetu

 “All creatures of our God and King,” seems like a benign beginning, a nice platitudinous acknowledgement of the creator. But. . .the song swells. The thoughts grow.

Leaving me
breathless
at the magnitude
of creation.

Overwhelmed
at the way
God stirred
and sung the stars
into the heavens,
the breath into mankind.

The rhythm of the familiar hymn sung in Swahili surges through my mind like a pulsating, driving force. It propels, for music bypasses my intellect and speaks to my spirit.

The pumpkin-colored sun rolls into its position above the escarpment. It filters through the pale morning light setting the scene ablaze with equatorial clarity. We are awake at dawn. The chickens began chuckling half-an-hour ago and we tumble-down the stairs hoping for water for a bath.

It is dry. The ground is fissured and the grass crackles beneath our feet. The long rains of winter did not come and people are hungry. They have chopped the grass with pongas (machetes) in our front yard to feed their scrawny cows. We have no butter and little milk because the cows aren’t producing.

Our world has shrunken from CNN to refugees on our doorstep. Somalis, Ethiopians, Kikuyu mingle uneasily under the hospital’s trees. World weary eyes beg for their children’s lives. It is not enough to write a check, smile and say, “Go, be filled.”

So, we are here. Praying for rain for the shambas, (gardens). Praying for true peace in the world. Seeing the selfishness of mankind up close and personal reinforces our faith even in the midst of our sadness and grief at the suffering. There is one simple answer. We celebrate His life each day. A cup of cold water to a person at the door, a prayer for a starving child, hope shared with the hospital pastor as he struggles to feed the displaced and heal the broken-hearted.

The students at the missionary school are fasting one meal per day so their food can go to the local children.