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I want the one I love
to find his place,
his happiness,
his passion.
I know he has found his home,
as I have found mine,
here where our hearts rest together.
But like us all,
he yearns to be needed
by the world beyond.
We are like puzzle pieces
needing to fit on all sides.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
This garden,
hidden up the hill
above the oldest gravestones,
has a gate but no fence.
I enter through the gate,
though it means extra steps
around the overgrown perimeter.
This garden
is lush with silver leaves--
no flowers, no buds preparing to open,
no dried blooms awaiting dead-heading--
no,
only leaf after silver leaf.
And the breeze stirs the silver leaves--
voices--
silvery voices.
I lose myself in this garden.
These voices of silver--
do they speak of what has been
or what shall come?
Or do they simply whisper what is?
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
When they turn us out--
no supper but water and bread--
I shall be nourished by your kiss,
sheltered by your touch.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
A giant, gray ballerina,
clumsy, out of control,
pirouetted through our small town.
Ashen dress wound too tightly 'round her legs,
she struggled to stay upright,
flailing her arms,
whacking our single streetlight
through the Miller's picture window
two blocks away,
staggering through the bakery,
ripping the roof from the library,
carrying off one of two stone lions
guarding its front steps.
(Books rained down as far as Cloverville.)
She stumbled across the park,
twisting the heads off several ancient oaks
and our granite founding father.
With rasping inhalation
she sucked the glass, women's hats and men's cigars
from shop windows;
with thunderous exhalation
she scattered shingles and porch railings
over cowering rooftops,
finally crossing the tracks
and heading for the grain elevator,
perhaps seeking a quick pas de deux.
In the silence left behind--
devoid of applause--
we opened our doors
and stepped out to survey
the carnage of the dance,
marveling at her graceless power,
the ravaged, monochromatic stage
from which she exited with such drama.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
As Christian young people,
we sang "Kum Ba Yah" and "Pass It On."
We also sang:
"Love, love, love, love--
the gospel in a word is love.
Love you neighbor as your brother.
Love, love, love, love."
What we did not sing,
but is implied:
"Love the Muslim as your brother.
Love the Jew as your sister.
Love the Republican as your brother.
Love the Democrat as your sister.
Love the homeless man as your brother.
Love the lesbian couple living in the house next door as your sisters.
Love the Episcopalian as your brother.
Love the fundamentalist as your sister."
The gospel in a word is
love.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
This evening,
let's sit in silence as the sun sets,
leave off the lamps,
let the room be lit,
only by the light that comes from us.
As our eyes adjust,
we'll discover our glow
is bright enough to find our way
across the room,
down the hall,
to a door we've never seen before.
Of course not--
it took our unique illumination
to make visible
the scarred frame,
the crystal knob,
the beautiful, strange carving on the wood panels.
Go ahead--
open it.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
I know a man
busily packing his life
with charitable--even enviable--activity.
But he's devoid of understanding
(or love for?)
himself.
Terror of awareness
drives him ever further
from his center.
Good done of the sake of avoidance:
I am confused by this.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Stop advising.
Lend your chest;
let me there
in silence rest
Wrap your arms;
hold me tight;
that's my simple
need tonight.
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
What qualities of your mother
have you absorbed into your personality?
And have you done so by choice?
What values of your father
have you incorporated into your worldview?
And have you done so by choice?
What teachings of your childhood faith
have you blended into your belief system?
And have you done so by choice?
The unexamined life
may still be worth living,
but is it truly your own?
Is it authentic?
And are you free?
Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
Is it possible
to die of tenderness?
At times my heart so fills
with unexpected kindness
that I fear it may burst.
So many poets--
with frightening beauty--
bring to vivid life
the inevitability of death.
And then, in a second's time,
I witness such delicate sweetness:
one cat seeks out the other, and they curl together--
raw affection, unselfconscious, unfiltered;
a child trusts a parent, reaches for a hand
with unquestioned, certain knowledge of acceptance;
someone I love, open-handed, extends his heart,
parchment thin and fragile.
In these moments of intense tenderness,
my spirit staggers between joy and confusion--
if the tenderness is so palpable, so visceral,
can dissolution also be real?
I prefer to live in tenderness.
I shall die, I think, in tenderness.
Text and image © 2011 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.
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