Lost and Found With Eyes of Love

by Rose Eileen Niles

January 24, 2013

Now

We are lost in grief

Remembering you best as deeply loved

Beloved and precious

The center of delight

How Aunt Rhoda lit up like Christmas

Wreathed with smiles when she spoke

Of you

Her bubbala

Her beloved Pamela

 

Now we are lost in grief

Remembering your sweet goodness

How you never had an unkind word to say

About any one or thing

And how your quiet strength stood

Pure and courageous

In the midst of the worst storms of anguish

 

Sweet cousin for all the cheerful kindness you

Brought to our lives

Your hale and hearty goodness

Your pure positive soul

We are deeply thankful to have had the gift

Of you

 

And now though washed in grief

Watered with tears

We believe with amazing grace

You delight again the ancestors

As you join their number

With their arms stretched wide

Together with the angels in light

 

Now for us you forever remain a beacon of goodness

Of peaceable strength

Now, soon, though we weep, we shall walk in your pure reflected light

Travel forward in purest hope to inherit a measure of your grace

In peace and forgiveness now we shall be found

As you are now found cradled in God’s sweet care

Blessed from a safe journey home

There are words that cling to my soul and ride it high

The way that a slight frown now carved into my high breast

Will ride and ride

And deep in the recesses of my arm pit

An exit wound where precious

Pearly nodes were extracted

Dripping life fluids

Set to guard and prognosticate my seed stitched days

New sweet channels wend and grab

And blessed

I wonder however I may choose

Display with pride

And not double dare to live

perhaps

Choose ink embroideries

Choose scarred words sacred not scared

As the surgeon so gently pronounced

Almost as an afterthought

There will be scars

And suddenly

There were Jesus and Thomas

And Mary and the old gang

to testify to divine language of wounds

Understand this

Or at least try

There are no endings except artificial measures

What is real continues

And what we perpetrate as endings

Sells the real up the river to be hostage

Against our legacy of heaven

If you wrong me

Or conspire to hurt me and I seek to

End with you

Except I know deep within

That the winding thread is still

Unwinding

Clapping my foot on the pedal and winding back the bobbin thread

Does no good

For endings exist like containers

Bowls, drawers, armoires, trunks, file drawers, cabinets, vases, trash buckets, jewel caskets

Adorned and unadorned

Honored and dishonored

Mourned and ignored

All the holding places, all the delimiters, all the declared endings, orderly and messy endings

We but impose to rid ourselves of piercing chaos

Yet that sweet blasted thing, though contained, never leaves the house

And we all exist like containers– resolved and dissolved containers

Relentlessly restless/ yet always bound for home and already there/ in some exquisite realm of never endings

Walk lightly
But firmly on the
Face of this
Good earth
Show up
Inhabit your sweet body
Create community
Know where you end
Your feelings
Your thoughts
And another finite
Beloved being begins
Eschew grandiosity
But know the majestic
Mind
Of God
The infinite spirit
In whose embrace
You lie down
By whose
Breadth blowing sweetly
You rise up
And take flight
Walk
Together children
Walk
Lightly and gently
But undeniably
In the deep of
This watery realm
Risk failure
Attempt six impossible deeds
Before breakfast
Bring your tears
As an offering
And let them go
Kiss them off
Like children eager to learn
And when they return
Ask for their wise stories
And offer your
Tales of joy
Live with substance
But be ethereal
Rejoice in memory
but delight
in the everlasting now

Poem for Befriending

Jump in
The stream is
Refreshing
Cool
Or cold
Or warm
Or hot
hot
hot
Whatever you are
Jump in and swim for your life
Will rise up to meet you
Your heart will be massaged
With tender fingers
Of remembrance
Be washed in the stream
Of
This is your life
Beginning
To end
And if you must
Unfriend
The reflected image
Of the great cloud
Surrounding
Chanting
Sweetly
Never look away

Know that your life is waiting
On that distant shore
Patiently awaiting
Beyond some golden door

A broken Hallelujah
the music woven
from songs of youth
wraps your rest
the song of faith
and memory
from newly loved technologies
springs forth
gladly
the practice of
unconditional love
sings forth as well
stumbled words
committed to memory
travel well
the special love we speak of
carrying the special bond
the unbreakable connection
confident
in victory
over death