Gone too long

They say, to speak your name....

Gone too long...to remember your fight against pain.

Gone too long to dwell in memory

Of amusement in the rain...

You've been gone too long.

How can she still miss him, they think...as if he and she were branches

From the same bent tree,

I'd have moved on by now, they note, and stopped going back...

They aren't comfortable
...that I can see your face so well,
hear the the bearded Viking laughing... smile up at those baby greenish blues.

Almost tweak that narrow nose, or listen for your heavy shoes.

Your clean welcome embrace

Summer and aftershave.

They're also uneven about how can "great love" coexist with many....

He wasn't your only, so how can you still be driven, broken, crying out so from his absence?

Because "Other Half" "Soul Mate"... those words are true.

Not as sappy as romance, or clean as Pleasantville...but the one who still pulls at you, after the passing, the ceremony, the dust...

Yes, he is gone too long, and you won't stop looking backward...

Until your dust, and his

Settle in together,

At last.

Building Blocks of my (ideal) religion

Why, when I pray...and see the very human anguish of Gethsemenae...

Can't I look further back and sit on the midwife's stoop...the herb garden....

Or dump them all, every faith I've seen.

For the one I've wished for...where Deity connects and sees and cares...As my one voice sings in some small stone chapel, heard further, further up, to intermingle with the stars at night.

That that same Deity leaves a cold list of expectations home with the housework...expecting and assuming that we know right from wrong...

And instead is a guide, a tracker, a map reader....just ahead along the road of life, and that like the edges on onions, old ideas peel away....and leave understanding behind.

Where is *that* sense of God...? That sense I sing to in the night.