Recent Preachings

A Reflection for Good Friday, April 14, 2017

The story of the suffering and execution of Jesus is one with really only three characters –there is the persecuted and long-suffering prophet; there is the heartless ruling power and its machinery of death; and then there is the third character – whether it’s Pontius Pilate or Simon Peter is all the same. This is the character in the middle, the one whose heart is not necessarily on the side of the executioners, but who dithers, or who washes his hands of the suffering of others, or who denies three times before the cock cries. He is the one who looks away at the critical moment.

Four Poems

I.

The Orange Line-- to take it

Is to plunge into the abyss

A hellish labyrinth of passages

 A Babylon of writhing limbs

Until out of it

One is yanked

Like a wide-eyed plate-bound fish

Into the polite and sunlit world

 And one's only sincere wish 

Cross-postings

My April newsletter contribution is below. I guess it's kind of saying exactly the opposite of my other most recent contribution to this blog, but hey, perhaps the complexities of life merit such contradictions. I choose to hide behind the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, etched on his tombstone, from his "Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle": I'll ha'e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken/ To dodge the curst conceit o' bein' richt/ That damns the vast majority o' men. 

Two Poems

I.

What is “identity politics”

            In 2017?

Does anyone even know

  What that term means?

I can see how in the old days,

Putting up the Quebec flag

Or saying “Why wasn’t Columbus included?”

Could be kind of a drag

  But these days it seems

Like all it signifies

Is: “issues mainly concerning people who are not –

  Ahem,

white guys.”