Telecommunion on a Monday evening

I felt a weariness, a slowness, 

A weakness in the spine

I cast about for strength 

(I had misplaced all of mine)

And you rang on the phone

And you talked to me of rest

Of hindsight-growth and forward-hoping

He always (always?) gives the best

(Even though it sometimes feels

Like His best is very strange,

Like five exams at once

-But on the fifth, a stronger range -)

It wasn't what you said, but rather

That you talked to me of Him -

And your words were like a breath of air

When the oxygen's grown thin.

And you didn't know I needed

You: 

Your words, your heart, your time

And to hear my heartbeat echoed back

From your end of the line.

Good Shepherd, Shepherd Me

When I care for my own comforts first and most

And quench the neighbourly 

Holy Ghost

Good Shepherd, shepherd me.

When I can't eat a gnat, but swallow a camel

In determined

Gullibility

Good Shepherd, shepherd me.

When I painstakingly tithe each leaf of mint

But hold the poor in 

Haughty contempt

Good Shepherd, shepherd me.

When my faith makes neither molehill

Nor mountain

Tilt into the sea

Good Shepherd, shepherd me.

When cavernous silence is the cry of my heart

And I can't even speak, or know 

Where to start

Good Shepherd, shepherd me.

Luna

We all try to capture her

At some point or another -

With lasso or paintbrush

Or ladder or camera or pen.

She rises silent and enormous

(A ghostly galleon 

Only if you have no idea what a galleon looks like.

Though sometimes clouds look like galleons, with great sails unfurled against a starry sky,

And she sits like an orb on the prow);

A lamp, slowly held aloft

By invisible and kindly giants;

A smaller, cooler, second sun;

One solemn, unblinking eye.

She arcs over us unnoticed

Haunts the day-sky pale

And bounds unremarkably from east to west

Folding and unfolding

Like pages of the calendar.

Until, laden with strawberries or wolves or blood or harvest,

She looms, full, into view,

And we stand slack

Heartstruck by her magnificence.

Jevver see such a moon?

-Never, we reply, gathering our weak snares.

And they fail, they fail, they have always failed

But, darn it, we're going to try.

In two weeks when she is laughable

- A lopsided grin, a skinny banana, a toenail -

We won't even notice her tucked in the corner of the sky. 

But tonight we linger over fence posts

Peer through branches

Race down the street to the end, for a better view

To hold her, to keep her, to make her stay. 

We all try to capture her,

At some point or another.