Adams Rd.

I saw a parcel of land for sale for a solid sum. In the photo advertising, a large oak tree stood next to a shabby white house with ivy growing up the trunk.  I think I would give the whole sum for one oak tree if my bank account obliged.  Massive limb-arms made of strength and integrity and wood; great limbs stretch horizontal far.  And when any oak hangs its massive limbs low, like the giant arms of my father, for a daughter or a son of Adam to climb up, a transaction is made that can never be revoked. 

No one has ever forgotten climbing about on an oak limb, nor the feeling of bark against the skin; legs dangling over the earth, one would go even higher--knees pressed into the ridges struggling for ascent, blood rushing under the skin, and a breeze igniting a sense of losing the bonds of the earth. 

Adams Road, Ozark. 

 

The Cardinal

I heard a cardinal chirping in the morning and spotted him perched on the chain-linked fence separating the yard from the menacing-looking trailers next door. They, clearly ravaged by time and uncaring, stand in sick declaration of how lives gone off the rails might live.  I think they should be pulled away and burned, their land liberated from their oppression, but some are occupied and one in view through the privet sits empty.  The red-singing-glory sat on the fence, breaking my view of them and rousing a sense of awe in me.

Red-feathered-he had no prejudice of perch.  He lit on the fence much closer to the trailers than the cozy, sage house I was watching from.  

My God, your beauty is for us all.  It is found perching on the old and the new, the stigmatized and the glorified.  Beholding this scarlet-feathered-flame elevates us all. Your beauty and presence is for the reeking drug addicts, the demoralized among us who disgust with their behavior and waste, and it is for the sanitized, the rich, and the privileged.  It lights upon this green gable, the room in which I live, and offers the beauty of relationship, renewal,of communion and connection again and again in complete gentleness and humility.  You, God, have no prejudice while offering yourself to all.