Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. ~Mary Oliver Sorry; you reminded me of someone who used to stand just like that, almost. I knew him a long time ago; loved him. As you see, I still think of him once in a while - at least, the thought comes. He gave me no promises. Later, I packed a box of mementos - packed it full of dried daisies, smooth stones, kisses in the darkness. I knew he wouldn’t be back. It took me a step-stool, a phone book, and a couple years to put it on the closet shelf — you have to understand, I had to push it so far back that I couldn’t see it, until earlier this year, when I moved. I brought it with me, too, able to see now that the essence of those days was a gift.
Tag Archives: poetry
Early morning, January 21
Lingering in bed
listening to steady rain
softening the fields,
whispering to the waiting
seed something the wind said.
Rebekah Choat
If I whispered…
If I whispered
in your sleeping ear
—I love you—
would your waking
mind remember?
Summer Rain
I lose myself in the sound of summer rain,
fling into the free-fall,
slip into a swollen stream,
ride the river-run down to the sea,
rise again into the sky,
lose myself…
~ Rebekah Choat
Mary Remembers (Palm Sunday)
However long I live, I’ll not forget
the wondrous things that happened here today:
the most extraordinary man I’ve met,
astride a donkey, redolent of hay;
the people thronging ’round him as he rode –
so many we were near crushed in the fray –
till Peter left the Master’s side and strode
into the crowd, demanding they make way.
A moment’s quiet; then a growing hum
that swelled to shouts, “Lord, hear us when we pray!
Hosanna, our deliverance is come;
our God has sent His righteous one to save!”
The men laid down their cloaks along his path,
and children waved palm branches as he passed.
~ Rebekah Choat
Carpe Diem (NaPoWriMo 2019/1)
Linger in the luxury of half-sleep, curled in the comfort of shared sheets.
Cradle the cup in your hands; sip the smoothness of creamy coffee.
Look long into the last fire of the season, bathing your body in its warmth.
Take the paintbrush lightly in your fingertips, just kiss it to the color,
and let the lines flow as they will.
~ Rebekah Choat
Ordinary Saints
image by Rebekah Choat
This past weekend, just before All Saints’ Day, I attended the Ordinary Saints exhibit and retreat at Laity Lodge, a lovely, tranquil place in the Texas Hill Country where hospitality is bodied forth on every level. Ordinary Saints is an extraordinary collaborative art piece: poet priest Malcolm Guite’s insightful poems reflecting on exquisite portraits painted by Bruce Herman, set to soaring music composed by JAC Redford.
We gathered for a weekend in the hills –
in God’s own country, right at Texas’ heart –
to contemplate the space each of us fills
through painter’s, poet’s, and composer’s art:
to learn to see each other face to face,
to trust and hold each other ever near,
not just together in this hallowed place,
but when we’ve said farewell and gone from here;
to recognize the holy in the daily
and understand that no one is mere mortal,
to know that, though we walk through this life frailly,
each eye we look on could be Heaven’s portal
in flesh and blood, not just on wood in paint,
we’re all of us God’s ordinary saints.
~ Rebekah Choat
In the Bleak Midwinter
The words of my best-loved dead poet notwithstanding, midwinter is not at Christmas time. Rather, it is now, as the grey days of January ghost into the grey days of February; now, when it’s increasingly hard to remember green and golden days of sunshine, and nearly impossible to imagine that they will come again.
My best-loved living poet understands this season well, and gives me words for the blank emptiness I often feel this time of year. But marvelously, miraculously, he also reminds me that it is a season which will pass, one which I will remember not only for its heaviness, but also for truths laid bare, strength given to hold on, and the tenacity of hope.
Because We Hunkered Down
by Malcolm Guite
These bleak and freezing seasons may mean grace
when they are memory. In time to come
when we speak truth, then they will have their place,
telling the story of our journey home,
through dark December and stark January
with all its disappointments, through the murk
and dreariness of frozen February,
when even breathing seemed unwelcome work.
Because through all of these we held together,
because we shunned the impulse to let go,
because we hunkered down through our dark weather,
and trusted to the soil beneath the snow,
slowly, slowly, turning a cold key,
Spring will unlock our hearts and set us free.
My November Guest
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
thinks these dark days of autumn rain
are beautiful as days can be;
she loves the bare, the withered tree;
she walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
she’s glad her simple worsted gray
is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate deserted trees,
the faded earth, the heavy sky,
the beauties she so truly sees,
she thinks I have no eye for these,
and vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
the love of bare November days
before the coming of the snow,
but it were vain to tell her so,
and they are better for her praise.
~ Robert Frost
So every day
image by Rebekah Choat
So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
one of which was you.
~ Mary Oliver
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