Shifting Paradigms
Tag: Writing
The Gift of Encouragement
The Gift
When you stirred a life up with your words
Peeled the layers of your past
Pared the skin, tough and bitter
Chopped the pieces into bite-sized
And pounded poems on paper
You gave a gift to me.
While you were writing
You let us feast on parts of living
The ones that live in poetry
They sit bitter sweet on lips of telling
But the white page holds such sweet redemption
Memories, hold the healing.
You carve, with gentle fingertips, the moments of your youth.
As you use your hands, your words for tender telling,
The ones that loved us all along.
And now the gift will live forever.
Oh the power of words,
Yours.
The love of them, you passed,
That now are mine,
Ours.
Know now how lovely are your words.
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Dedicated to my mother on her birthday, April 22, 2013.
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Joining Laura at Laura Boggess dot com
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A Perfect State Of In Between
A Perfect State Of In Between
When the door opens on the old white ice box
he peels back the Reynolds
aluminum foil, covering the prize he’s purchased
and reveals the blue guys from the sea.
We’ve been waiting for awhile, well a year
for them
and I see myself.
But don’t tell him, or anyone.
Timing is important.
Well it’s everything in fact.
And seasons come and go.
It’s their season now.
The soft shells are ready, and I am too.
I see myself in the metal pan under the foil.
In them, in this perfect state of in between.
Change made them perfect.
Life stopped for them, perfection frozen
At this time of molting.
I hear the excitement in his voice.
The eyes stare up, the pairs of beady blues
Row on row.
We know this soft shelled state.
We know it well.
And we know the seasons too, the ones of change.
Are there really any other.
And it is where we live most of our days,
In between
The shedding and the growing
The softening and release.
Gone are layers, left to float ashore.
I want to thank them for the gift.
An offering, a delicacy.
For stopping at the perfect time
And showing me the joy
that shedding brings
A perfect state of in between.
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Into The Beautiful
The broken shards, the razor sharp edges , cut like jagged glass. And we bleed. We bleed red, we bleed tears, we bleed fear and trembling.
The spinning earth throws us into a tailspin, head long into her tail winds. Upright vertical, we now are nearly horizontal. Stretched by the force of gale force winds of living.
We walk limp and slant. We walk bent and drag our weary cane, invalids on the life march.
Without Your beauty. Rust and all.
Frame for me the beautiful every time and everywhere. Share your canvas, ripe and waiting.
And let me paint with You.
Lend your kaleidoscope eyes to me. To see a sky while still barely breathing. Battered from the power of beautiful. Shaken by creation’s power. Every single time. You repeat and re-repeat your holy masterpieces. And form them into new again.
Point me toward the beautiful so I can see as you.
Hold me in the beautiful, while frayed edges of my soul seem faint and frail and close to death. Mark the God art everywhere and peel the scales from my blind eyes. Take the old and make it new, once again. you create and re-create at speeds which dizzy human flesh, spinning life in your formed beautiful.
I lay awestruck in the path of creation’s beautiful. Its blazing trail of color, texture, shape and form.
Heal me with Your beautiful. Cradle me in the woven glory of your hands. Shelter me in storms of lovely where brilliant moons and radiant light drip down on life lived here. Walk me toward the beautiful. And lay me down in sheets of white linen crisp and cool. Where I can slumber in the beautiful with knowing of your holy steady hand.
Rock me roll me into a holy beautiful, where I can dance with You. And wake to waltz in fields of beautiful, growing outside the portal of my world.
Teach me, show me beautiful, when broken cries come look at me. And help me see Your beautiful in the midst of raging deadly seas.
Just wrap me up in rags of sacred lovely. That bind my bleeding wounds. And let me feel your healing hands surround me as I lay there soaking in the salty waters, beautiful on sandy shores of grace.
Wash me in the white hot beautiful, clean, awake and ready to receive all beauty made by you. Remove the blinders on my eyes which block the morning dew and green spring new. That shadow, hide the up and coming shoots of Earth’s new offerings.
And point me toward your beautiful, in broken, shattered, hurting places.
Teach me how to find the beautiful. Paint it, write it, sing it out. Loud enough to echo toward the deaf ,yet soft enough to whisper with a sweet I love you.
Just spin me, twirl me, brace me in the broken beautiful so I can weave a masterpiece of beauty. And point always back to you.
With your gentle hands of grace.
Lead me steady straight
And cross me over mercifully,
Into beautiful.
I’m asking God for one thing, only one thing: To live with him in his house my whole life long. I’ll contemplate his beauty; I’ll study at his feet. – The Message, Psalm 27
Joining Emily and the group of writers there that have become friends at Imperfect Prose on Thursdays. Come by and read, visit, quietly or drop your own words into the link up there. Emily’s is the place for grace.
elizabeth w. marshall 