Category Archives: Poetry and Stuff

Today there is a hole

Dark and deep

Within me.

I look over the edge

And try to see

What’s there.

Just blackness.

I am not wise enough

To see the depths.

I feel all lost

As if I am wandering

Perhaps I lost my compass

In that dark hole.

I wonder why I dropped my compass

Just at the moment I tried to see

The depths.

Maybe one should not try so hard

To see what wisdom hides,

Trusting to be led from day to day

By one whose hand is steady and

Already knows the way.

Mama             by Edwina Gateley

I did not know
how fiercely
a child could squeeze and loose
my heart.
I did not know
how deeply
his sudden, momentary absence
could chill my guts.
And I did not truly know
the passion
of God’s love
for me
until a child slipped
into my life
and called me "mama."

There are times when my poetic mind

Is flat broke for inspiration.

Life presses in too tightly

And there is hardly room to think,

Let alone create with rhyme and rhythm.

The guys come home hungry from work

How can their mother refuse to cook them food?

They look right fagged out from

Building small bits of paradise. 

In someone else’s yard.

And the girls need things from the store

Mostly they need my money

I think.  Or my car to get there.

Girl stuff.  They don’t want to be seen

By the boy – a classmate at the counter.

And I let them use me, knowing that

Too soon they will be gone.  My house

Will echo with empty walls

I will prepare food for a full table

And no one will come to eat the leftovers.

So for now, I will rest my mind.

I will gather memories,

Set them in store rooms till some time,

Winter descended, time suspended,

I will work on them;

Knit them to a cozy blanket

To cover myself in the wonder my life has been.

Have you ever experienced that trace of something akin to longing for a distant place to which you should make your way?  It is somewhere just past the edge of my conscious mind.  It is a sense of something existing that is beyond the reality we know.  It is something more than my mind can catch a hold of – like the reality of another level of existence that I do not understand but that my heart calls out to become part of.  It is as if I know that someday I will understand and belong to that place but for now I have to live in skin.

Beyond

I live in a misty valley

Beyond which lie things

I have never seen.

Rumours?  Maybe

A place of wonder

Beyond this wall of mist. 

My hands fumble searching passage,

Where is the hidden door?

Fog slips through fingertips,

Only mist and more mist beyond mist.

The nymph of the place beyond luring me

To who knows where?

The sun?

I am charmed, seduced,

Drawn by this dream

Of another world,

Of light beyond the low grey clouds,

Beyond this mist.

There! Did I hear it call again?

The nymph sings

And I can not join it yet.

Psalm 62:9 (NLT)

From the greatest to the lowliest –

All are nothing in his sight.

If you weigh them on the scales,

They are lighter than a puff of air.

Small Breaths

A puff of air

No more,

Scarcely even a breath,

Our days are nothing.

We are born.

We live,

Hardly even a small breath

Exhaled quickly

For the Divine.

Then we are still.

Yet, he esteems

Us; small

Breaths. Gathering us he

Raises a current.

Zephyrs trusted

To carry

Gossamer seeds. Moving them

To good soil;

O Breath of God

Your breath in us.

Morning Prayer

In the quiet of the early morn,

Before the children stir,

Before my busy work begins,

I attend to your voice.

As the sky waits for the rising sun

So my heart waits for your voice,

O Divine Word.

As the sun splashes fiery colour

Awakening the sky,

O Son, awaken love in me.

Colour me in your hues

Of character.  Let them be rich

In likeness to you this day

For your glory.

I thank you Lord

For you are very near.   Ps.75:1 (NLT)

Why did you choose to

Love me so intensely?

It is easier to imagine

A distant God; fierce and cold.

But you break in on me;

Interrupt my isolation.

Longing, like a deep sigh,

Sends me seeking you.

I am used to distance.

I guard the space

That insulates my life.

Calloused skin adds

Thickness.  Insensibility

Sets in to match my blindness

And my deafened ears

Till I am self contained.

I know I am not worthy of

A God who’d choose

To wrap himself in

Human cells and sinews

Just so I could know,

Or begin to know,

How much I am

Desired.  Delighted in.

My God. Incarnate Gift.

Beloved One. Gentle Saviour.

The mystery of your love

Tears off my wraps of

False protection. 

I thank you Lord.

Teach me to sense again

That you are very near.