Liturgies of life

It's been raining all day.  A grey day that might have been dropped upon us right out of springtime mud season.  And I am thinking of the changes a year brings. Because this time one year ago, I was birthing a baby during a snowstorm.  A little piece of God's creation that He must've spent a bit of time knitting together inside.  Little Leaf was long and heavy, not like a newborn at all, and the nurse gasped when she put him on the scale.

Happy birthday, my son from womb, earth, ash, and God.  As your name means, you have truly been a gift to us that demands much "praise and thanks."

The changes of a year are vast and all so small in time.  We grow and die, eat, love, sleep.  We agonize over things that won't go with us into any kind of eternity.

I wonder over my writing a lot, wondering and not writing, that words and articulation are slipping away from me as I choose this liturgy of life and motherhood: wake, feed, read to, entertain, interact with, cook, clean, rest, read to, play with, clean, cook, eat, rest.

But I pray that words will come again when my rituals have changed and that the words will be richer because of these young creatures of beauty that God knitted together in mine and Farmer's lives.  And when I am tempted to pity myself about my lack of word life, I will remember that something of my children will be eternal beyond my books and poems. They are a joy, our Dandelion and Little Leaf and I would gladly give up every letter, word and paragraph for them.

My poem about writing and motherhood. 

"The calls" 

The garden calls

Certainly, the weeds don’t want my

attention.

But the zinnias wilt in my general

direction

begging with drooping yellow leaves

to be rescued from thirst and heat,

from the clover and dandelion that vie with its roots

for earth.

Please nourish me.

Please protect me,

they call.

My infant calls

and so does my two year old.

They wake from naps

hungry and angry, respectively.

He searches for my breast in a

whimper like a desperate giggle.

She wants my laden arms for herself.

They exist in a state of unsatiated thirst

He for bodily nourishment

She for learning the words, the meanings, the colors of living in

her own universe.

Please nourish me.

Please hold me and teach me and tell me,

What is that?

The words call.

They are wilting in the darkness of the

unwritten

Black lines, dots and circles, disconnected

in the absence of heart and brain

and energy

Sometimes I can’t hear the words

anymore

The weeds of lost time and

unpractice

wither and weaken old and new paragraphs.

Please call me forth

Please imagine

Please conjure and articulate

This garden as it begs rain

This baby as he cries

This child as she learns

This word life as it slips away

and back towards me

In an aching and unbreakable link

of life to words

words to life.

One year ago

Daddy and Superboy

Brother and sister hugging

Brother and sister meet for the first time