Healing Liberty

For ten years the patient muddled through

And for eight more he managed the neglect and decline.

The festering sepsis soaked limb and liver.

Liberty Morris was broken and breaking.

Passively and actively

The insidious infections in his soul

Coupled with the toxins he ingested.

 

And the nurse arrived on a partly cloudy day,

Loaded the crab-walking fool into a Chevy Nova

For the rented pilgrimage to the clinic.

The pathetic wasting hirsute beast

Was loved and fretted over by the Philosopher Queen.

She had healing in her heart,

Courage in her spirit to spare.

 

Slightly old doctor Goidel Glas, examined patients near an olive tree.

Liberty stumbled, sprawled on the earthen clay, regarding the healer.

 

Mountebank, I have been ill for half my life, it suits me well;

My illness is now mine own self.

Conceal your cathartic contraptions and catholicons,

Restrain your pretended ancient knowledge

My condition precedes, exceeds, destroys a breathless cosmos.

 

No pill, no tincture, no intervention, no thing can heal the dead

Save a hypothesized cure which I have never heard of before,

Though I listen hourly for the thing that never has come.

It never shall.

Remove yourself from me and suffer the words of the ill:

 

I am the man from the beginning that recedes to sickness

To find strength through my own strength.

My ill wisdom is my authority, borne of my mastery of brokenness.

So you, hoarder of remedies, shall receive my dispensation.

Your treatment is my death, your remedy is my reduction.

 

The Philosopher Queen boldly loved him.  Still.

 

Goidel sang healing notes that eased the pain,

That soothed the mind and lavaged the entire spirit,

That fed the soul with a bread beyond description.

The Philosopher Queen offered down a strong, scarred hand,

Raised the old fool up, brought him back to the freedom of healing.

She saved him, healed him, with those songs, again and every day.

Squirrel

The mostly shuttered hospital has become a hulk of bricks 

Where children once were born and grandparents passed.

The nurses and doctors have taken the healing arts

Out of this once consecrated space.

 

Agonal breaths of a lung that enlivened this city

Become gasps for a stale air that has receded,

Calling all to a different pile of bricks for the next half generation,

Distributing ineffable mysteries of catharsis.

 

And spying upon the old grounds a new creation springs forth -

A squirrel has taken careful carefree time to bless this tiny maple.

In the crook, in the elbow of a diminutive leafless arbor,

He scratches his ears and watches the rushed and chilly scattering.

 

Barely noticed, he notices each ailing clothed creature.

Does the squirrel judge, does the squirrel spurn, does the squirrel dismiss?

Such destruction of the bonds of creation are impossible

To this perfect beast, enjoying the thistled garden.

 

Caring for his fur, he wipes away the dirt gathered from his journey.

At times on all fours, or else princely only twos, he rests.

He rests knowing that his wooden mast is safety.

And he cleans his ears so that he shall hear God on the breeze.

 

Down from the maple and once more processing upon the earth below,

He again regards us who are commemorating and willing

This manmade hospital to be as glorious as the squirrel in the tree.

And with first created peace, the squirrel heals those who hear and see.

Endurance Retold

I gave you a song about those two trees over there.

Surviving just beyond their precarious adolescence,

Soaring to see beyond our crumbling buildings. 

And I told you a limb had splintered on one tree

While the other grew strong and proud.

I told you that I stood there and watched it happen. 

Though I did not tell you the rest. 

Restrained by the form, I was short of time

To tell you about the moments I spent watching.

Moments, and perhaps even hours -

Time spent on important matters of soul. 

Hands on my hips and I surveyed nature. 

(Nature is often my poetic subject, and by that I am most surprised). 

Looking to juice meaning from the mundane. 

I stepped out of my shelter and breathed the succulent air. 

Those two oaks opening the leaves of their pages 

And unraveling timeless theology. 

I read the icons to the ceiling of their vaunted vault.

The vengeful sky roiled with porphyric percolations. 

Their dark bloated billows eviscerated themselves

And pummeled the earth with sheets of damaging and deifying water. 

I stood motionless, planted as the trees,

A reader of their lessons and revelations. 

Washed by the deluge and ignorant of the thunder crash,

I planted myself in obedience to the bucolic cathedrals’ example. 

The width and breadth of the storm hurtled west to east

Though I stayed in my place to see what would be. 

Remaining steadfast until the shower ceased, I spied a new world out there. 

The world had the two oaks as their regnant lords. 

Under their protective span remains (even now) a bistro table. 

One chair remains as it was before the winds. 

The other toppled on its back with no agency of its own. 

And my time of contemplation was completed. 

Returning to the menial tasks of occupation

The second chair remains defeated for another contemplative surviving another storm.  

Endurance

Two oaks rooted deeply in a green field
In a countryside a mere mile from you. 
I approach their ancient stand, my needs sealed. 
And the blanketed sky yields its blue hue.

Motionless by the oaks waiting for change. 

Dry air cedes the world to the droplets massed.
And I the witness planting pedals upon the range
The storm washes me, I stay, 'til ire past.

For the great length of the divine drenching, 
I remain still in that place while the rage raged.
Tranquility in my heart enduring
Each storm fails to uproot while life goes aged. 

And one oak limb splintered and fell to earth. 
The other nourished, adding to its girth. 

Reclamation

Derelict house

Dancing mouse

Crook of tree

Through you I see

Sparrow quest

Building nest