ASH WEDNESDAY
-for Jerry
All year I've had your ashes
here on the living room hearth
in a box artfully crafted
and lovingly finished;
it's time now to return the box
to the woodworker and return you
to the ground out of which you came.
We will bury the ashes here
in the garden where you,
over the years, dug resting places
for one small dog and another,
and keep your ashes sealed so that
when the angels come for you
at the Resurrection
they will find you all of a piece.
Everything of life points to endings
and beginnings. We live the in-between.
I hold you there. You
created one summer night on the prairie
from the rise of familiar desire; you
brought home from the hospital to
sleep four-in-a-bed in a homesteader shack;
you formed over the years
by love and hard work
and faith in the everlasting.
The box is borrowed. It's all borrowed.
We claim what we can.
I will keep your ashes in the garden
and mark them with something that grows.
—Donna Hardy March 2011
One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.
Ellery Akers
If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you,"
that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
~~ By Raymond Carver
Tools for creating
What's Really in My Heart
(reflection altar)
