"washing with words from her clear springs of singing"

[bronze_ribbons]

Some weeks, it just doesn't gel: started three letters while on election duty last week, and abandoned them all 2-3 pages in. Started a poem earlier today, but it's behaving like parachute material -- flappy in peculiar spots and dead flat on the grass otherwise.

Even so, I've promised myself to get 500 words of sermon drafted tonight. I was trawling through Vassar Miller's If I Had Wheels Or Love for possible meditation texts just now, and these two poems stopped me in my tracks.


Prudent

I dip a cautious foot in the Atlantic
Of generosity, yet keep my wits
To draw it out in time before I panic.
I give myself away by modest bits
In crumbs fed birds of dainty appetite.
I give my love out in judicious doles.
Mine is the wise man's, not the widow's mite,
Leaving in my largesse enough loopholes
Through which I may escape if necessary
To practicality. For, though no miser,
Conservative and not reactionary--
I shun those few whose goodness is a geyser,
Who cannot comprehend a balance sheet
And fling their lives like pennies at God's feet.


A Word to the Wise

I'm moving forward, yet my past crowds in,
Racing ahead almost, passing me by,
If such were possible. The air grows thin
Because this ghost gang sucks the oxygen
Out of my lungs until I gasp and cry,
"Get out of my way for God's sakes!" How high
their plaintive voices instantly reply,
"We cannot. We are you." Your own skin
Is not so close, for that is what you slough
Every few years till the end of your days,
While we both more and less than mist, allow
No one to lose us or to shake us off.
Hamlet and you remember -- since always
Your human heart's clock hands stand still at now.