The story continues. The children in detention at Clint are being moved to tents. In the heat of a Texan summer. If they are not frozen into hypothermia by dialed up air-con, it’s fry them under the sky. Sleep deprivation, no medical attention. As one talking head said, “It was deemed that sleep deprivation was inhumane at Guantanamo for adults, but it’s okay for innocent little kids?”
Prayer for Detained Children
How can your heart not break
in half?
Now is the time when it needs to
be whole.
Let go of its armouring plaque.
Offer it, even with its wounds and scars.
It has no fatal lack.
It beats with the heat of sacred flame.
Let that inform your next act.
Oh, Sacred Heart!
Though blemished, unbound.
We hold your sanctuary space.
With all the love that can be found.
Deliver them to a safe place.
Let no one remain displaced.
Deliver into cherishing arms,
to familiar faces,
away from all harm.
Copyright 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.
I found this image on Facebook posted by Dave Loudon Creativity. I can only suppose that with its public posting it is free to share.
I could relish NaPoWriMo’s Day 13 poetry prompt. It’s all things witchy and magical.” Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something mysterious and spooky! Your poem could be about something that is mysterious and spooky in a bad way (like a witch), or mysterious and spooky in a good way (possibly also like a witch? It depends on the witch, I guess!) Or just the everyday, mysterious, spooky quality of being alive. ” Now I don’t really do spooky, but I do do WooWoo. I do live in the liminal space where magic can and does happen now and then.
My eye also fell upon a random note. My nickname and nom de plume (Bee) is derived from the Old English for been, or bean, meaning “a prayer, a favour.” It then became associated with working parties like sewing or quilting bees. And, by way of synchronicity the other day I arrived in the classroom just as the kids were closing their Irish books. I flaunted my minute Irish vocabulary, mentioning that I was nearly late because my husband was doing meitheal with his mate. Meitheal is the Irish for a working party, neighbours helping each other get work done (“many hands makes light work”), especially at harvest or hay making time. Even the teacher hadn’t heard this one. And I did spell it right! (I checked when I got home. Preen moment.)
As to the featured photo of the white calf…well, it is standing before a fairy fort. And any pure white animal with a single red part is in with the fairies.
Hedgewitch
This is what the black bird said: You can slip between worlds through this gap in the hedge. Each tree's knot, knarl and burl makes you wise to ways nigh forgotten, all but for those of us who fly or crawl. But The Good People like to make allies with some of the Other Crowd who've no knack for stomp and stalk. They like silence, but can sing loud. Because you need to know how to dream a world into being.
It's like this,the blackbird continued, saying: Magic is made of many parts- prayer, song, a pure intention backed by your flora and fauna friends, done by the movements of the moon. It's the knowing when to sow, the time to reap, the way to keen. Magic is in neighbourly exchange of hedgerow jelly in autumn time and the collecting of sloes to flavour Yule wine. It's shooing lost sheep back to their fold and helping mend fencing strong enough to hold any gleeful lamb who leaps too high too soon like the calf that jumped over the moon.
And then there is this: A hedgewitch keeps herself well only so long until someone else can spell her and assume her magical work between the blackthorn and the hazel trees, to ken the mending of what has been rent between the folks that stamp and stalk and have lost all good sense, those who simply cannot see what lives in the woods, what lives in the trees. Or The Good People, living beyond yon hedge, in the gap where there is a magical screen. They who work all the magic yet are never not seen.
I woke up late, after a rare unbroken night’s sleep, slightly anxious about the blank page. For the past twelve days I have had a theme to be my companion when I face the page. Today…I was on my own. And I had to remember my routines before the twelve days of Midwintertide. So I decided to do a bit of email housekeeping. There was a new comment for yesterday’s poem, which implied it had rain spell qualities, or at least it appealed to my reader’s California drought mentality. Then I scanned my 2019 horoscope by Chani Noble and this quote jumped out at me. Words are spells, cast them wisely.
The featured image is a meme doing the rounds on Facebook, provenance unknown. If anyone knows, please let me know. Love it!
In the weeks prior to St. Brigid’s Day, or Imbolc, allow me to direct you to my collection of poems Brigid’s Way, inspired by this goddess/matron saint. It is available in Kindle on Amazon.
I respect thoughtfulness. I respect prayer and I practice it often. But I admire most a phrase that I think I encountered in some Quaker literature – Love in Action. Which simply restates the adage ‘Walk Your Talk’- but with the addendum of walk in love. In a week where there have been a lot of thoughts flying around the interwebs, and most surely a lot of prayer, I have crafted a spell. And since auld Samuel Beckett said “all poems are prayers” this is my weekly poem. Which is also a heartfelt spell working. There have been too many Parklands, Pulses, Sandy Hooks. And may the little children lead us. They certainly are demonstrating a raw fearlessness in the face of tragedy. May they be surrounded with Love as they take action. Thoughts and Prayers
Enough of thoughts
Enough of prayers
Enough of tears
Banish the fear
May Love disarm you
Enough of being bought
Enough of anger
Enough conspiracy jeers
Banish the fear
May Love disarm you
Enough of siege and SWAT
Enough of all coming to naught
Enough of the primacy of crackpot
Enough of the always all too sure shot
Banish the fear
May Love disarm you
Enough of cowering in closets
Enough of bandoliered bigots
Enough of ideology driven budgets
Enough of guts and gore as year-round climate
Banish your fear
May Love disarm you
Copyright 2018 Bee Smith
Featured image is a painting of Samuel Beckett by Barry Hodgson, owned by the author.