The Lights

Stars, my friend, must be one of the things

That keep me up at night,

Because they are just like the sun:

Even when clouds cover my vision

I still have expectant confidence that

They are there.

And beyond that,

They remind me of you—

All the things you’ve done,

All the things you do

And all the things I don’t know yet.

They remind me of my life,

A gift I’ve received to use to shine.

Maybe it’s been hidden away for some time,

But maybe I let it out every now and then

When I remember the lights above

And how they keep me up at night.

No matter how dizzying the evening becomes,

I know I have something to hold on to,

Like you and all of life that’s true.

So just show me the way

And I will hike on

With the earth beneath me,

With my heart still beating,

With the lights above...

With the lights at my side...

With light healing...

With light...

With light....

So comes the dark night,

But there is light.

Faith and Hope

And the bright stars found us again,
Waiting for the dawn.
And I've stood under these stars before,
With the love of the saints and their song.
I've stood on the foundation
And felt my heart beating
To the rhythm of the universe,
To the rhythm of the waves breaking on the shore,
To the rhythm of a breath
Breathing along with mine.

And I've stood under the rain
Of broken cisterns that can hold no water,
That could never hold any water.
And I've run from myself
And I've run from my King
And I've longed to return again
Because my heart is still beating—
It keeps pumping my blood.

And I've seen the daughters of men
Weeping with holes in their hearts
The size of a double-edged sword
Mistakenly wielded and turned within.
And I've seen pain become bitterness,
Where the broken and torn hearts fester
And never seem to catch enough of the healing water—
Could never hold the water that lives and breathes.

I've been there and seen these
And continue to stand there
Because I know.

And I'm confident
And I expect.
There's a new song coming
And a new dance to go with it.
There's a place where the day dawns
Into a bright blue sky,
Where my pain
And the pain of the ones I love
Burns away in the warmth
And washes away in the sweet dew
On the hills in the land
That we will call home.

And right now we have your love
And we have my love—
And your hands are with mine.
Blood still flows through our veins;
We still have the ground beneath our feet;
Our lungs still breathe in and breathe out.

I will never give in
To the worst of our fears.
I will never back down
From what I know is true.
I will find something beautiful
And nurture it back to life again.

In the Great Field at Mount Holyoke, Under a Dome of Stars by Greg Rappleye

This is one of my favorite poems, so I figured I would upload it.


(Click on image to enlarge.)

Concerning that Evening outside Lexington

Always trouble talking about science.
Even the poetry house welcomes you and says,
"Es muss sein!" — "It must be!"

I remember an evening
when the stars broke their orbits
and came down to meet me
as I stood in a crowd of people.
Our bright lights, heavier than I knew,
reached out their hands and grabbed my head
and shook my shoulders.

Everyone standing there watched, astonished.

Some said, "What we have here,
though difficult to understand, makes sense."
Others said, "Only by some dark, dark magic
could he have made the stars come down."
Still others—maybe those with sense—
simply ignored the whole spectacle.

And at the end of it,
the stars decided to shake my hand,
burning it, I assure you,
right before they said, "Have fun!"
as they piloted up through the atmosphere,
back to their rightful spectrum.

So they left me there
with their maddening partners,
the sub-atomic particles,
who I barely had time to meet and understand
before the girls in the crowd gathered around—
addressing my success
and addressing my wounds.

Distracted as I was then,
and as life spun me onward
away from that evening,
sometimes late at night
I look at my scarred hand
and consider what I learned
from those great masses of burning gas.

I remember how either way,
soon after the stars left,
the crowd grew weary of me.

And the religion house,
the murderers of every prophet,
even they welcome you:
"Es muss sein!" — "It must be!"

But the stars laugh and say,
"Consider how the little girl rose and
was saved from the dead!"
Always trouble talking about science.