Acceptance

“Inevitability” by Alan Brain

 

submit to the change
accept that the choices
were written in fiction
defiance profits no one

Friendship

“Paso Fino Friends” by Marcia Baldwin

 

giving acceptance

trusting character enough

to banish its ghosts

 

 

From my books Ephemera and Riverthink

Gethsemane

“Agony in the Garden” by El Greco

 

in a sorrow of olives

did agony speak

quiet lesson in prayer

a foreboding of

imminent suffering

let this cup pass

will and weakness

conjoined and inhered

in a most human hour

while nearby exhaustion

from grief and from fear

laid three hearts down

in sleep of despair

loath to witness

a strengthening angel

assist in their Teacher’s

divine transformation

resolved to submission

embracing with passion

all pain of mortality

trusting that love

has a purpose

a purpose so great

it required dark

midnight betrayal

to reach its fulfilment

Terrible Truth

 

“Grief” by Vrindavan Das

a presence of absence
exists in the waiting
a thing of departure
that lives within hope
in the ache for return
a thing solid and stout
as the summer tree
felled for the firewood
wanted by winter

a tangible emptiness
stands in the space
of what recently was
but which no longer is
in the chair where he
lived and endured
all those difficult years
sits the substance of
yearning to have him
returning a need with
dimension and weight

such is artifact hunger
comprising the wait for
beginning of something
for ending of nothing
a desperate desire for
reprise of a yesterday
fulsome again with
good wood and good
blood in appreciable
bones of extravagant
blatant reality

heady persistent
corporeal memory
shimmers and shines
as a mocking affront
to the logical lucid
acceptance of loss
for she has neither
stomach nor spleen
for the terrible truth

 

Why

“Pure Beginnings” by Kit Hevron Mahoney

nothing small
should distract
from the living

stealing what
should be the joy
from each moment

from tasting
rewards of large
wholesome experience

hesitate not to
accept whom we are
in our circumstance

pale are beginnings
long since become
inconsequential

what matters is
how we move forward
inventing our ends

too precious is
time to be wasted
on wondering why

the small question
whose answer is
always irrelevant