image by Rebekah Choat
The slightest breeze can stir my soul
to wonder, longing, joy.
Today the air is dead calm.
~ Rebekah Choat
Dead Calm
Category Archives: poetry
Suspended mid-air
I am a wind chime
suspended, still, mid-air,
waiting for breath.
~ Rebekah Choat
A Thousand Mornings
image copyright Joel Brotzman 2013
A Thousand Mornings
by Mary Oliver
All night my heart makes its way
however it can over the rough ground
of uncertainties, but only until night
meets and then is overwhelmed by
morning, the light deepening, the
wind easing and just waiting, as I
too wait (and when have I ever been
disappointed?) for redbird to sing.
Best of any song by Wendell Berry
image copyright Rebekah Choat, 2013
Best of any song
is bird song
in the quiet, but first
you must have the quiet.
~ Wendell Berry
dawn takes forever…
photo by Chris Choat
Dawn takes forever some days.
the sky remains unchanged for hours,
oblivious to the ticking of the clock
growing louder each second.
It’s no use to sit and watch for it.
I know. I’ve tried.
The best you can do is
go on about your business,
muddle through however you can in the dark,
until you are surprised, dazzled by the light.
~ Rebekah Choat
What stood will stand by Wendell Berry
photo by Rebekah Choat
What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
And every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground like grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall — field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
~ Wendell Berry
old photographs
photo by Rebekah Choat
Stacks of old pictures:
what stories – what truth, what lies –
do they have to tell?
~ Rebekah Choat
These times we know much evil…
photo by Rebekah Choat
These times we know much evil, little good
To steady us in faith
And comfort when our losses press
Hard on us…
For we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go —
Into the boundless dark.
~ Wendell Berry
soaring…
photo by Rebekah Choat
Silent holder-out
of hope, small, fragile, yet you
lift me to the skies.
~ Rebekah Choat
a druid way…
a found poem from Frederick Buechner’s Brendan
a druid way of saying God –
the rustling of oak leaves,
the sound of shallow waves against the rocks,
the feel of mist drifting knee deep
over the blue folds and hollows of the hills.
~ Rebekah Choat
