slapdash #10: find the sky

hands strong
with love and wandering
always
taking in, tasting, smelling,
kneading.
to explore and to memorize so constant,
you failed to notice you were picking
the tear in my jeans.

i'm not alive like you.
i dont desire to smell something
i've already smelled
or already judged.
i do not see newness
in old
like you.
i do not see others in new
like you.

you are science and art.
you are brother yet father.
you are zeal yet control:
they call it meekness.

you are a man of war
weeping to red and raw.

you break me and build me.
both by love.  both by paradigm.

i cannot describe you out loud-
not for not knowing,
but the words swell a world
caught in my breathing-
i cannot do both.

innate, rising visions demand
to be satisfied
by sky.
clamoring, pleading,
since the fourth of july.
"i must rise.  this is all i know."

you say, "i am yours,"
and i know it is costly.
i say, "i am yours.
our hands will find the sky."

slapdash #9: henry scott holland

i have this devotional called "joy and strength" that i think was written in the very early 1900's.  i totally love it.  no one "tells it like it is" like the believers of the 1800's.

here's todays:

"put on therefore, a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving each other, if any man have a complaint against any; even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye." - colossians 3:12, 13

the discord is within, which jars

so sadly in life's song;

'tis we, not they who are in fault,

when others seem so wrong.

-frederick wm. faber

"self-preoccupation, self-broodings, self-interest, self-love- these are the reasons why you go jarring against your fellows.  turn your eyes off yourself; look up and out!  there are men, your brothers, and women, your sisters; they have needs that you can aid.  listen for their confidences; keep your heart wide open to their calls, and your hands alert for their service.  learn to give and not to take; to drown your own hungry wants in the happiness of lending yourself to fulfill the interests of those nearest or dearest.  look up and out, from this narrow, cabined self of yours, and you will jar no longer; you will fret no more, you will provoke no more; but you will, to your  own glad surprise, find the secret of "the meekness and gentleness of Jesus;" and the fruits of the spirit will bud and blossom from out of your life." -henry scott holland