via crucis -- third posting

8.
Fugitive my memory – hiding while revealing.
Wisps of fog and whispers
Undermine old patterns
Give evidence in snatches
And snatch away the facts.

Where is my archaeologist
To weave story from these fragments?
See the tooth-marks in the bones,
Know the scat of the hyenas.
Which of these stones were merely ever stones,
And which crude weapons to subdue the soul?
When I picnic among ruins
Are the ruins really mine?

Generic is the house
Where the children have been silenced
(Here is no continuing city)
But the scars are all my own.

9.
This rose my rose
How sweet it grows
My own heart’s blood
Makes red this rose ..

Constantly you add stones to my soil
Yourself protective overhang, to block the soft rain’s falling
To block the light from heaven
Be shelter, stifle me ..
You drain all the nutrition
Because your need is greater …

This rose my rose
How sweet it grows
My own heart’s blood
Makes red this rose ..

Who owns the weeds? You claim that they are mine
I do not recognise their mutant forms
Are these my monsters grown leafy green
Returned to me to strangle mine own heart?
Or alien sowing come unrecognised
From one who comes to steal, kill and destroy?

This rose my rose
How sweet it grows
My own heart’s blood
Makes red this rose ..

And yet this life
Makes dead this rose.

10.
Silver the rain that washes
On the just and the unjust
We stand and shiver
We drink and live
With our mud-splashed legs
And our slick wet hair
The just and the unjust
Here made clean
Together thirsty
Together washed
Together needy
Together cold

May your mercy fall
In its silver light
And our rainbow hearts
All become as white.

May we own our need
May we own our pain
In Your soaking grace
Become one again.

11.
I have loved the moon’s high calling
I have loved the light of day
I have loved the night’s soft falling
I have walked the twilight way.

I have heard the songs of angels
In the tears of my own kind
Though to tears and wounds and hunger
I am all too often blind.

Sharp the word that cleaves through birdsong
Making rainbows in the air
But the hand that lifts a brother
Is a hand that’s raised in prayer.