The prayer of the 5% quarter-saint

God, cut my sight when I’m needing of soul.

God, give me patience and bits of control.

 

Excessive control may ruin the ride,

but, God, I need limits; still keep me inside.

 

God, help me love her. God, help me be.

God, make me Buddha under the tree.

 

Let me wander at times to feel that old spike

- I tend to feel you and I are alike.

 

But, God, I still need a little restraint.

God, have me rent the clothes of the saint.

 

Not too much, sweet God. Enough just to know

I couldn't be saint but shouldn’t be hoe. 

 

For a great many reasons

 

Homes and kin and not just jobs

had been taken from tons of us.

And so we gathered

 

and called ourselves the freedom convoy.

 

Canberra, 2022.

 

Real hard. And yet, we cooked and ate collectively.

Lived off donations on gifted camping space.

A great many hordes of gratefulness

and righteous resolve

and all of that.  

Well, not so perfect as that sounds; still human, still messy, y’know.

 

But thousands and thousands moving

to places beyond,

to places together.

 

I can’t feel only indignation

re what forced us to that point.

 

It’s like heartbreak and failure, y’know;

like the broken bones and the miserable years

and all of that.

­­It’s hard to wish these never were, with all

the lessons, the growth, the openings. All of that.

 

I recall the walks I’d take

throughout the crowds,

returning with mates from across the nation.

Canberra, 2022.

 

It’s not all-encompassing

to abhor the hardest times

 

for a great

many

reasons.

The ugly ones

 

I didn’t know it then, 

or perhaps I did, 

but I was a part of the ugly ones. 

 

I stood for something though, 

or perhaps I hid. 

I was a part of the ugly ones. 

 

You couldn’t tell us. 

It’s a complex kind, 

the story of wretched ones. 

 

She came along. 

She lagged behind  

to share in a forgotten one. 

 

She left and it showed 

in every light 

that we were all the ugly ones. 

 

But by such nakedness

there comes by night

the freedom to be ugly ones.  

The early old

 

I’ve asked your hand to stay in mine,

and you’ve obliged. But that which gives you life

attends me less with every year. Goodbye.

One final dance that never was.

A wave that never hit.

Farewells that never did begin.

All this ended long ago.

How glorious it was.

How messy and how young. How young, how young.

How long ago.

 

Once I grieved the loss of childhood.

Now that grief for something new: the later young is left behind.

Less now about responsibility

than consequence. The early old begins.

Glory to this, too.

Glory to change.

Glory to it all.

The silence and the

I used to play and muck about.

It’s a been a while since then.

I used to sit with God and shout

about the silence and the Zen.

 

Age and strength and passing days

came along and set me right.

And God became a bunch of ways

to talk about the out-of-sight.

 

But still I can’t begin to claim

I know a thing, Amen.

But every year I’m less my name

and more the silence and the Zen.