Saving Two Birds with One Poem :)

Today’s FOWC is Idiom, and I wasn’t sure if it was possible to use the actual word “idiom” in a poem, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and participate in Fandango’s Flashback Friday. 😀

This is a poem that I posted exactly 5 years ago. The original post is here. I’m grateful for this one. Good job, Jenna from 5 years ago!

---

When life is hard and full of sorrows,

You hold them in Your hand.

You, who with all grief acquainted,

Are stronger than this world’s sand.

Hold me tightly my dear Savior,

And redeem this day,

May I be safe in the Beloved,

And in Your goodness stay.

---

Jenna from 5 years ago then adds, “There is always, always hope.”

Something to Remember

I’m having trouble finishing almost all of the poems that I started today, so here is one that I wrote yesterday, no prompt. It is a butterfly cinquain. 🙂

---

O Heart!
Remember God
Created my being,
The reason for my existence
Unknown —
But Love
Nevertheless keeps on calling,
“Cor ad cor loquitur,” *
In a language
Hidden.

 

* Latin, “Heart speaks to heart”

Hope and Lament

This free-verse poem is for FOWC: Lament and MLMM’s Saturday Mix and is shared with today’s Writers’ Pantry.

---

We can have hope of Heaven,
A foreign land and yet the
Human heart’s native place:
Mountains and valleys of the Earth
Are beautiful, yet can’t replace
The God in whom souls find their rest.

We can have hope of Heaven:
Mountains and valleys of the Earth
Cause tiredness in wanderers’ feet,
The journey sometimes horribly long.
We rejoice because faith makes strong,
Yet lament that there are no shortcuts.

Washed (Again) In Honesty

The shadorma below was written and posted 2 years ago. I am sharing it again for Fandango’s Flashback Friday. Here is the original post.

---

Quiet tears
Obscure my vision,
But I know
You are there —
These tears are the salty veil
Through which you see me.

Reaching New Heights

I colored the picture below for Linda H. Hill’s coloring club for June. A sonnet, which I’m sharing below, was inspired by the picture. 😊 I intend also to write other types of poems about that Bible verse, which I did with a different picture a few months ago. See here, here, and here.

This took me almost 3 weeks to finish.

May feet be like those of a nimble deer,
Upon the heights enabled now to tread,
With simple courage pushing through all fear,
Out of the comfort zone gradually led.
Out of the valleys of despair and death
Up to a place of rest, more solid ground.
No longer so afraid of height nor breadth
Of paths ahead, nor challenges around.

A fawn becomes a deer as legs grow strong,
Its mother helps at first to stand up tall:
Immediate it’s not – can take a long
Adventure to at last no longer fall.

Stability of earth, be under me,
Until I reach heights of eternity.

Life is hard when you feel things.

But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?
– Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (1937)

Hidden in Tiny Seeds

This poem, a Diamante inspired by last Sunday’s Gospel reading, about the “mustard seed” of faith creating a much larger plant, is built on contrast, so I’m linking it here.

---

Seed
Tiny, insignificant
Waiting, germinating, sprouting
Container, power, trunk, sapling
Growing, reaching, leafing
Tall, strong
Tree

Time / Eternity

For FOWC: Transitory. Shared with the Writers’ Pantry at PSU. Today, we Catholics celebrate Trinity Sunday, so I have been thinking a lot about the transitory nature of time and of this life, as compared with the permanence of eternity. One of the 6 or so poems that I wrote is a Diamante.

We Waltz by Faith

For DVerse “Meeting the Bar,” we are waltzing with our words. I’m a little late to the (dance) party. 🙂

---

We walk by faith not sight,
Yet faith’s more than a guess:
The Holy Trinity
Becomes soul’s welcome guest —
He teaches how to live
And how to, trusting, rest.

The life of faith is hard,
Yet also it’s a dance:
A deep relationship
To daily life enhance —
Eternally enjoy
Exploring this romance.

Palinode

Although this is a bit late, when I saw that DVerse was challenging us to write a palinode for this week’s Meeting the Bar, I had to participate. I almost never write these, but they are special to me: Back when I was an atheist, I wrote three poems about how God probably doesn’t exist. After I became a Christian, I felt bad about it. Then, during the next NaPoWriMo, one of the prompts was to write a palinode, and so I wrote a palinode for each one of those anti-God poems, retracting their statements. It was a healing exercise for me, and when I read the story of Jesus and Saint Peter in John chapter 21, I was floored!

Today’s palinode has nothing to do with that, but I really wanted to share that background story. This is, instead, written as a response to the shadorma I wrote yesterday (click here).