Mothers Missing Children: A Prayer

Lion of the Tribe of Judah

This poem is in remembrance of Louwana Miller who never gave up hope that her daughter Amanda Berry was alive. The mother died before she could be reunited with he daughter in the flesh. However, her prayers and the prayers and faith of others kept Amanda Berry, Georgina Lynn DeJesus and Michelle Knight alive and brought them back to their loved ones after 10 years.

For all the mothers who are missing children and praying for their return, this sonnet is for you.


               Mother's Day Prayer

Despite all darkness, loneliness and pain,
My prayers continually search through  space and time
To penetrate thick walls and cut through chains
That block escape, destroy your will and mind.
Trust God, His strength. Accept His soul embrace
As it ignites your powerful spirit life,
Against all physical harm that would disgrace
Your pride, oppress you with its hateful strife.
Be firm within, determined, hopeful, strong.
You know we'll find their dark and secret shore
From clues they've left. We'll right this unjust wrong
"Assured!" Lion of Judah* triumphant, roars!
Have faith! Impossibility with man,
Is possible with God, the great "I AM!"


*Lion of the Tribe of Judah is a Biblical reference to Christ. Please note that the lion Aslan in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe represents Christ. C.S. Lewis has stated his lion is a reference to Christ and discussed this with individuals who questioned him about it. Liam Neeson most probably isn't familiar with C.S. Lewis' writings on Christian apologetics.

Gore Vidal: In Memoriam

It is about four months from a year since Gore Vidal's death. His impressions of the country would certainly not have changed. I can't help but think that the body of work he has left is worthy of study in campuses across the nation. Connected with political science, culture and history, his was a patrician voice, but he spoke for the people who could not speak for themselves. He was a paradoxical combination of elite and everyman. I wrote the sonnet right after his passing. Now, I've added "Notes and Impressions." I'm glad his words resonate to chide this nation. Is anyone listening?

Vidal's second memoir

Acerbic, vitriolic, searing words,
In you fermented, then poured out, a draught
Of wine. We sipped refreshed, the wisdom heard.
It quenched our ravaged souls and spirits wrought.
We culturally dispossessed? You raised us high.
Redeemed our history's worth with wit and grace,
And literary gifts none could decry.
Your genius ne'r could Truman* er' displace. 
Self-described emotionally cold were you
Patrician, righteous, prophet of the age,
To Buckley calumnious, to Mailer crude,
Tiresias: forthright, just, a humorous sage.
Your writings live, though Death choked off your time.
You lived a maverick's life, one of a kind.

*Truman Capote. Vidal and Capote often knifed each other's work or person with serrated sarcasm 

NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS

I read a good deal of Vidal, his American Empire series from soup to nuts beginning with Burr and ending with The Golden Age, the seventh and last historical novel in the series. But I was introduced to Vidal much earlier in my teen years when I saw him being interviewed on TV a frequent guest of talk show hosts. Unfortunately, I missed the spectacular program with Vidal, Mailer and another guest on the Dick Cavett Show which I read about later in Cavett's wonderful Talk Show. I thought he was witty then, but didn't come to appreciate his great talent for word craft until much later after I read his two memoirs and then moved on to his essays, the empire series and Julian. He was incredibly prolific. I saw The Best Man on Broadway last year, twice, and regretted that I never worked hard enough to get an opening night ticket in the hopes of being able to speak with him to tell him how much I appreciated the gift he had given Americans with his empire series, an iconic history of the country seen through his eyes and in great measure neither accepted nor acknowledged by many historians. 

Vidal was a beautiful young man.

However, Vidal could care two hoots about them and their traditional and non investigative approach to the study of this nation's glory and infamy. Vidal was edgy, calculating and unafraid to peel back the onion to arrive at the meat of what was often an ugly core of colonialism, paternalism and corruption which he laughed at with a bitter, sardonic irony that revealed the child-like hope he still held for this nation which never lived up to or embraced the best part of itself or its ideals. In many ways he was the last political intellectual, uncompromising and undaunted in his outlook at what he noted was the growing oppression of freedom of thought and the burgeoning of the corporate-political fascist state. He was our voice, he was our conscience. And who shall take his utterly American place? I shudder to think of it. RIP, Gore Vidal. You were a professed atheist, but God loved you and loves you for His magnificent creation who like Jesus' Nathaniel within whom there was no guile. And if you were not true to yourself? You were brazen enough not to let on that you may not have cared.

In his last years, stentorian, a statesman who mellowed ever so slightly.

Let Freedom Ring

Our country's liberty bell in Philadelphia is cracked. Would it be whole again; would our spiritual freedom be realized.

May all of us uplift the freedoms we do have in the US. May we have the courage and power to fight for the freedoms/rights others globally are attempting to usurp (all the industrial complexes-food, political, medical, media, military, security, and those who engender them to lie, cheat and steal, screwing over the American public financially and psychically, keeping them oppressed). May the country be awakened to truth spiritually (not religious dogma and political religious dogma which is a lie perpetrated by the power elites).  Liberty must be fought for daily with one's eyes open. Let's wake up!

Who shall be free is more than just a phrase
Proposed by wealthy to unite their cause
And revolutions organized to praise
Quaint leaders, make us think and give us pause.
For some the free "have nothing left to lose,"
For them, then, freedom has no worth or price.
For others freedom's something that they choose
Renouncing all they own in sacrifice.
A paradox, my freedom's chosen; yet,
I had no choice; had nothing left to lose
But priceless I knew freedom's value set;
Did not disdain what I did freely use.
My spiritual freedom's paid with Christ's dear blood.
Receiving Grace, I'm bathed in Freedom's flood.

Dynamic Relationships

Jonathan Pryce as Davies and Alan Cox as Aston in The Caretaker currently at BAM

 Viewing the power struggle between individuals in The Caretaker was revelatory. Egos were the problem; humanity the potential cure. The inability to touch another's soul the devastation. How does one connect? Through compassion, through empathy, through the Spirit. But before that is possible, one has to be in the Spirit and to do that is impossible if one is flesh, ego, pride. Only with God is such compassion and empathy possible. Pinter revealed the emptiness and loneliness of humanity in crystal clear dialogue that the wonderful Spirit and humanity of the actors brought to life in the production. There was no perceived answer for humanity's abyss, no cure. Faith can bring the cure, but it is impossible without the electricity of Spirit  to convey the truth. A beginning might be Psalm 23rd and prayer.

When egos step between our soul and mind
When consciousness does sleep, is unaware
That we manipulate our past unkind
To get through tribulations so unfair.
When others drag us through their cruelties
And make us bow to their warped childhood blights
And wipe their dross on us like we're debris
And trash to dump in pits to fire their sight.
Then call upon the Lord and pray for strength,
And vision to untangle any web
That's bound you up. With Him you then can rent
The chains that would to slave your soul and ebb
His Grace. So seek His Joy, His peace, His Light.
Destroy all bindings with His loving Might. 

Resurrection, Rebirth, Renewal in Peace and Joy: The Meaning of Easter

IN CELEBRATION OF EASTER I'M GOING TO GET A BIT POLITICAL. THIS SONNET, PARAPHRASING THE WORDS OF THE LORD ARE FOR THE RICH ELITES, THE POWERFUL BANKERS AND INVESTORS, THE WALL STREETERS AND THOSE WHO COMBINE AGAINST THE MASSES FOR THEIR OWN AGENDAS. After all, they are people too.

What plainer way could Jesus' sacrifice upon the cross, the Passover Lamb slain, then resurrected be remembered during Easter, then through His own words, "I am the resurrection and the life. No man comes unto the Father but by me." But what does that mean? My mom told me of a man she knew who kept on going up to the church pastor again and again "wanting to be saved by Jesus," but not understanding what it meant. Born again? They have become DIRTY POLITICAL WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH HATEFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE PEOPLE. What a shame.

In all of my acquaintance, and I've lived a while on this planet, I know of no person who has not faced trials of the soul, depths of despair, self-hated, self-criticism, horrible self-doubt. Who has not said a prayer for relief from self-torment and terrible inner soul pain. This soul pain transcends economics, gender, race, creed, ethnicity. It makes the power hungry fearful to maintain control. It causes division and familial hatreds. It is the reason why a very few control the world. It is not greed, it is abject self-destructive hate and self-hate. For what you do to one man, what you cause for one women you DO TO YOURSELF. So in creating poverty, the elites add burdens to their souls that they will never be free from, never. They are chaining themselves up to think they need no one and nothing, but yet they are so fearful of losing power, they're in a GLOBAL SOUL PRISON of their own making. Welcome to hell on earth. Aren't you glad you are not of their ilk? That is why it is easier for a rich/powerful person to go through the eye of a needle than for him/her to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. They cannot SEE OR THINK that there is such a thing as THE SPIRIT. They are fleshly materialists and embrace material futurism.

When Jesus died, he went to hell and preached. And then he was resurrected. THIS IS DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE IN HELL (get it?). And of course it is for the rest of us in the human family.

I am the resurrection and the life.
No man will come to God but by belief
That I have conquered sin and Satan's strife
To save mankind* and give him* soul relief.
It is by sacrifice upon the tree
That I redeemed all souls from worldly lies.
It is my blood that cleansed guilt, made you free
From self-hate's self-destruction, you despise.
Embrace my love this day and come to me
My  sustenance will bring you peace of mind
Embrace me! Come  by faith for you can't free
Yourself: man's ways are chains that always bind.
This day receive my Grace and Mercy, too
Rebirth, renewal, joy will live in you.

*Women were put above men in Jesus' time. I use the noun mankind because of the syllabification. To make the sonnet sound better. If it offends you, sorry.

Mary Magdeline saw Jesus first after His resurrection. He honored A WOMAN before the men disciples. He was friends TO WOMEN and WOMEN preached in the early church and were famed for being great in working to spread the gospel. So I am happy that of all the religions, Christianity is the least paternalistic IN THE BIBLE. I can't speak for how men and various denominations twist this to suit their own paternalistic, controlling ways.
 

Breaking Through

When does an individual become his or her own person? Sometimes, never. It may take a village to raise a child, but the child must then strike out on their own and make the world a better place for others. To realize your place in the purpose and scheme of the fabric of life requires constant submission to the divine. It also requires complete trust in what you may not even understand is present or real (God). So the journey is a long one, but there are vibrant illuminating beacons. You are never in the darkness for very long. And when the light is particularly bright, then you do see your condition and the state of your life. Then is the moment of decision. Is it possible to be uniquely free to find your passion that is divinely inspired? What do you have to sacrifice to achieve it? Ego? Lies? Bondages? Faith in Christ can be the way toward freedom. And the price has already been paid.
 
The culture shapes and pulls us to its will.
Parents, teachers, pals do tie our souls.
And as we're buffeted by these queer ills
Our selves in tangled images unfold.
We question who we are and what we'd be
Propelled to think their thoughts they hold us in
The lies like walls occlude what we would see
We're caught. True thought then never does begin.
It takes a lifetime to cut soulish ties
Be light filled, free from bondages of man
It takes great strength to try and try and try
Promote our independent soul to stand.
And only through Christ's help can we break free
From cultural patterns to uniquely be.


See link related to the theme of the sonnet.

Galileo Galilei and God

 
Oh Galileo! Did you not "make waves?"
The Catholic Church would burn you at the stake.
But you profoundly studied 'til your grave
Though fearful cardinals would your soul to break.
A physicist! The foremost of the times!
You disobeyed, like Paul, and traveled to
Old Tuscany to preach the heavens' rhymes
In concepts blasphemous to monkish "truth."
Those scribes, those pharisees in spirit like
The same who crucified The Son of Man
Could never justify their devilish strike
Against God's great astronomer and stand.
The One whose physics tamed The Galilee*
Displaced the carnal church through Galilei.**

Jesus with fishermen ; Raphael


Sonnet inspired by: http://tinyurl.com/6m8y5ae

*Many of Christ's greatest miracles happened at or around the Lake of Galilee: feeding the 5,000, calming the storm that frightened the disciples, walking on the water to Peter who lost faith and was sinking. Here he taught the disciples to be "fishers of men."


                                       **Galileo's last name.

Lithograph of the lake and fishermen 1890-1900