Voice Lessons

Who greens the earth from desert,
prunes your vineyards laid to waste?
Dunes no nomad wants to cross
Times no sage would choose to taste
Poison food, polluted water
Dry bone empty pails
Women teaching daughters how to wail

His Euphrates seven streams
His ocean tide is moving out
His path a sea of glass without
a threat from rain or drought
Yonder wolf sleeps with the lamb
The King with Abigail
Ladies teach his righteousness
or teach their daughters how to wail

Royalty scratch the serpent head
With pride as he misleads them
Wealthy wizards long misled
Scratch the tail - no way to please them
Chainsawed men are cracking - snap -
Black branches breaking sound
Limbs a thousand horses crash
The distance to the ground..
Shot up splintered stump prepares
New Earth framed from Eden dale
..Egypt glimpsed the Holy Fire
Mounted their attacks and failed
Foes who fought this blessedness
and daughters cried and wailed

Monsters gather steam through
hot swirling clouds of dust,
War birds circling, eye
A headless carcass sniffing lust
Shining angels lithely,
slithering unto separated males,
Descend red molten river flanks
In the darkness women wail

There's the two-edged saber dripping blood!
Severed royal head from royal tail
Let now the dead be burying their dead
Ladies teach their daughters how to wail
©2008-09 g.o.

The Word from the Graveyard

The earth waxes old as a garment,
is at best but a temporary grave
Beyond that blue sky out the chilly window of your fourth floor apartment,
a better place to live than icy in a mortician's cave
That's the admonition that he said to save

In the midst of death on parade,
either he'd lift off to a life-sustaining planet alive,
or, heed, embrace the promises already made
The places prepared in the heavens which survive
meet up with the faith of all his people who arrive
©2008 - 2012 g.o. | To Dad. Thanks for speaking up! ..

Dad - b1923 - d2012

---

..telling me (in Spring, 2008) about looking out the window of a Dr's office or of a hospital room - neither of us did clarify which, or exactly where it was.. Regardless, he was quite lucidly generating the imagery captured then rendered shortly thereafter like a bolt of lightening (above)..

In t/his 'Word* from the Graveyard' are latent images in some of Dad's blue collar, sometimes anti-intellectual sermonics about life and death from his fascinating OT perspective..

Perhaps he neither realized (this) nor would want any credit (for t/his inspiration) but such moments with him, from boyhood on, inform on both (interests,) my OT major in Seminary (60+ graduate hours) and some of this (sometimes haunting) lit, cast simply, perhaps, as transmitting a humble/d working man's sermon - no pulpit required.  

*Isaiah 51, KJV : ' Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.'

(To an Army of One)

You see them from the Bible
Love sweeps them from their feet
They hunt you down, they're tribal
They attack you, your so sweet

(and Delilahs tracking Samson feel blind romance in the air
One thousand women running finger nails through your hair)

Refrain:
A thousand women want you
Let it be no shock
You heard a thousand women want your diamond, wanna rock

The man they want is something
The boys they kissed long gone
Their husband has one woman else he's not around for long

Your time is for one thousand ladies
Time is on their clock
No time out now, don't interrupt
One thousand women talk

That pounding sound is marching
One thousand women strong
The ground around affection shakes
They know where you belong..
©2008 g.o. | To M.R.

Note: There are a thousand verses to this ancient song--way too much material for a single Google blog.