Pancake Tuesday

Normally a Saturday ritual, it seemed
we should mark this day with pancakes too,
a breakfast-table recollection 
of how feasting and fasting so often cohere. 
Even, I thought as I mixed egg and milk 
the night before, even mark the way 
that air fills the batter like 
pockets of life, as these very 
ordinary, meager elements of that life - 
egg, milk, flour - are mingled 
and Spartan fare turns to luxury. 


Yet how to explain to those for whom 
life's a constant grazing table that 
sometimes, though luxury's just 
a whisking bowl away from our grasp, 
it might be meet to go without, 
to join the cousin in the wilderness 
with camel's hair and the desert's lean pantry, 
to turn our hearts to the sight of Life. 


And how to explain to my own heart, 
so accustomed to gorging and hairshirts alike, 
that all is gift, when the breakfast ends and 
the drive to work begins, 
when Adam's curse taints feast, and fast 
is sometimes only a puff of air? 
How to tell the shriven soul 
to take the fast and the feast in turn, 
to sit at table and taste this grace 
as death is at work, yet life is too, 
as life is at work in you.

Birdsville, Werribee

This morning a bird I could not name 
spanned a sun I could not tame 
and on the road the dazzled day 
turned and turned its winding way. 
Through chicanes, past milkbars ran 
the path to work, the time to plan, 
but I was struck by birds in view 
on Kookaburra Avenue. 

And God I'm sure made birds to fly 
both for their sake, and yours and mine. 
In dying days we see these dreams 
and wait for life to burst its seams. 
In ordinary time we catch 
the moment when we see the latch 
of heaven's door creak open, wide. 
Wipe dust from street; come, come inside.

Ordinary Time

Meanwhile, pluck tomatoes
ripe from the garden.
Watch the quinces shed their fur,
turn late-summer-yellow,
and burst with promise while
cockatoos eye them off.
Check the peaches.
See the opening flowers on the lemon tree.
Cut the roses, deck the table.
Water, plant and wait.
Number days and count the joys
and trust that tears shall cease.

When we’re no longer burning

All day the hazardous haze,
yesterday too. I feared to take
the children outside; even the garden
was clothed in the smoke of elsewhere on fire.
Discomfiting, yet
we saw the world,
a greenbluebrown orb of God’s grace
heaving with the death of it
and caught the surge
through smoke-drunk eucalypts
of a day that will come yet bids us fight
for the day when we’re no longer burning.

2020/The Future

Dear past:

We don’t have jetpacks.
We still walk, don’t hover,
there’s no button to press to pick your dreams,
and still only some dreams come true,
not all good.

Old men still have grey beards, if they have beards.
We can predict much and change little.
Some things we prolong.
Some days we are better, some days worse.
We have not finished the tower of Babel.
Cain still envies Esau, and Seth
tries to stay well out of it.
We haven’t stopped the fires burning,
though many are scorched and tired from the effort.
Heaven is still an apology away,
and most days that’s still a bridge too far.

Astroboy has not been born,
astroturf invades the street.
This is not quite how we imagined,
exactly how we’ve made it.

Yet

…my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.
(Christina Rossetti, “Old and New Year Ditties”)

Sometimes a harvest, sometimes fallow,
sometimes Job’s cut-down tree,
the year passes in a sighing nonetheless,
a barely whispered “Yet”:

yet this is not all,
this is not how all years shall go,
this is not the only movement that time possesses for us,
this is not the only sun our earth will orbit ’round,
this is not the end of years,
this is not the ground.

Tomorrow await ever-new mercies;
tomorrow see what tarries yet
will surely not delay.