The front page of your paper is bound to make you sad
Especially if you’re the worrying sort
So turn the front page over where the news is not so bad
There’s consolation in the weather report
It’s a lovely day tomorrow
Tomorrow is a lovely day
Come and feast your tear dimmed eyes
On tomorrow’s clear blue skies
If today your heart is weary
If ev’ry little thing looks gray
Just forget your troubles and learn to say
Tomorrow is a lovely day.
(Iriving Berlin)
Valerie and I were working on wedding invitations tonight. She found the stationary that she’s been wanting at bargain prices, but we had to order them immediately. This meant that, in order to get our own wording on the cards (instead of stock phrasing), we had to write them up tonight.
We searched for poetry already written that said what we wanted to say, but found none. So I tried my own hand at writing Hallmark poetry.
The first attempt wasn’t so… appropriate:
They called it love when we held our hands together
And called us fools when we allowed not love to take its course
But greater love has none of us than charity
Which lays down its life and takes up another by its choice
It’s a bad omen to mention fornication in the wedding invitation, right?
The second attempt seemed much better, so we’re going with it:
It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves
It is He who has brought us together
His is the tie that shall bind us as one
And His mercies that guard us forever
I would like to point out that it’s been just under a year since I wrote poetry last, and now I’ve written four in as many days. When it rains…
And now it’s late. I’m going to bed.
I see you’re into me
Like a Mozart’s into music
Like a Rembrandt’s into painting
Like a baby’s into being
Being alive
I see you’re into me
Like I should be into you
But I just can’t seem to get my heart around
…Turn my heart around
I see you’re chasing me
Like an comet chasing starlight
Like a clock that’s chasing moments
Like a cloud that’s chasing rain
On a sunny day.
You paste me up like sunshine
Like a cloud that’s chasing rain
You just don’t seem to ever let me down
…Don’t let me down
How many broken bones have you found this way?
How many undertones have you brushed away?
Is there anything left in me that you haven’t changed?
It doesn’t matter, anyway—
You never leave me alone.
Second try from the same night. This one’s only about half done, if you can’t tell. I need to get another set of verses and another chorus, but repeating the last two lines. Anyway, it’s incomplete, but I like this one better than the last one. Seems more intimate.
UPDATE: Third verse. I think I’ll leave it at that unless new inspiration suddenly drops on me.
I see you’ve got me now
Like a ring around my finger
Like a rope around my neck
Like a chain around my arms
As you lead me home
You’ve captured me for good
I can see it in your eyes
“I’ve finally got you where I want you now”
…I want you now.
I know I have a home in Zion
A land where milk and honey flow
A place where all my dreams and desires
Will fade before the One I know
His glory shines above the highest mountaintops
His patience bears me far beyond my schemes
His love resounds when I am lost and wandering
His grace is far too much for me
And yet somehow, when all the past is gone
When all my brokenness is burned away
When all the crimes of humanness have flown
He still retains the core of me.
I have a home where flowers never fall away
Where birds have yet to fail to sing
Where peace and rest are never far away
And where the One who knows me best returns
To put to rest my best attempts to be.
UPDATE: You know how really good music can do amazing things with mediocre lyrics? Yeah. When I wrote this song, I had the most amazing jazz melody going on with it. It was great. So great, in fact, I didn’t really notice that the lyrics were only so-so. Now, a couple hours later, I’ve completely forgotten the melody and all I have left is the lyrics. What’s more, every time I try to reconstruct the melody from what I remember, it comes out really hick/country sounding.
This song is now totally ruined for me. I hope somebody else gets something out of it.
UPDATE AGAIN: I rememberd my cool melody. Song is better now. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from my disillusionment, though.
It isn’t quite your holiness,
And it isn’t quite your love
That consumes me when I first get up
On a well-rested morning.
It’s a little bit of both, I guess.
Like the dew of your tenderness,
It covers me so thoroughly,
And makes me want to run, laughing,
And also to sit still.
I don’t know how to explain
What I don’t quite yet understand—
The dreams I have that peel me open
Like a not quite blooming flower
Revealing every earthed and unearthed desire.
So painful to be ripped so gently open
And so grateful when it’s over
So broken, and so at peace;
So unsure of what I’ve just gone through
And so much wishing that it could have gone on forever.
It is a peculiar quality of my religion
That it holds the broken reed above the straight one
(as no musician would).
The smoking flax is greater than the bright one
Because it cannot help but to announce
That something in its life is lacking.
As something in my life is always lacking.
So it comes as no great shock to me
To find that I am reaching for perfection
And yet to find that I am never quite achieving it.
This little lack is all I have, sometimes,
That draws me back to Him
Who makes my heart to breathe.
In fact, they weren’t really getting along well at all. It was pretty rough. They kept arguing about things. There was the name calling, and the blame shifting, and I, their poor godchild, kept feeling like it was all my fault. There was some talk even about breaking up, getting a divorce. I think it was mostly my mind who was the disgruntled one, didn’t like the way my heart was doing all the leading in the relationship. Then my heart would get all whiney, and start crying, and all that self-pity mess, basically guilt tripping my mind, I think. I really felt stuck in between them. I kept having to hear both sides of it. It wasn’t pretty at all. Anyway, they basically separated for a little while, tried to “see other people,” that sort of thing. Fortunately, I think after a little cooling period, they both realized that they couldn’t really start over with anybody else. They need each other too much now. So my heart has moved back in and we’re trying to pick back up where we left off, which has been really good for me, the happy godchild. You’ve never seen someone more messed up than a person whose heart and mind are divorced. My heart still tends to be a little domineering, and tries to jerk the reigns a little too hard, but usually my mind is able to calm her back down. We’re not perfect, but I think we’ll be okay.
What were you thinking, when you held my hand,
Ran your fingers through that uncombed mass behind my head?
“You don’t really love me,” is what you said,
When you asked me for the seventh time
The secret to my magic strength.
Could it be that for a moment
You actually thought you loved me?
Not the man of titanium, so light and strong,
But me, stubborn and corruptible, the one who
Could not decide if he was meant
To marry Philistines or murder them?
You were my second almost-wife,
My second chance to lay to rest
The hostility between our peoples,
My second chance to prove
There’s not so much difference
Between a Gentile and a Jew.
We were so beautiful and so different
Lying next to one another
Fascination and xenophobia
Making love to one another
Did you think that I was beautiful
As I lay there, head almost in your lap?
Did you smile at my innocence
As I swept loose bits of hair
That fell on my nose and mouth,
As you gently sawed each ragged lock?
What were you thinking, when you awoke me?
“Up and face your enemies,” is what you said.
When they took me, tied me, blinded me,
Did your insides leap for just a moment
That last time I glanced at you?
Your face was the last thing that I saw.
When you smiled and waved at me,
Did you whisper to yourself,
“At last I know he loves me”?
You are Lord of every morning
And You are Lord of me.
This is not the poem
That I was supposed to write
With little nymphly parallels and
Bold colorful allusions
This is simply to apologize
For the poem I could not write
I could not compress it into
Any kind of form but
Wild, ungainly prose
It’s sitting on my desk now
Wishing it were elegant
Wishing I were elegant
Wishing it were anything but prose
This is how rebellions foment:
A tentative discontent
With the order of the world
A first realization that perhaps
Our gods are not quite big enough
To make us what we want
I do not wish to go about
Putting limiters on God
But perhaps He also finds himself
As frail as I am
Before my work of art
Not so much unable but unwilling
To make the kinds of cuts and dissolutions
That would please another artist
Or even the unnamed longings of the work itself
What can my poem do
To work revenge on me
For never quite creating it
So little power has a piece of art
Over its creator
What can a poem do
But resist my gentle molding
Denying there has ever been
Such a thing as poetry?
I can trace our falling out
To the first day she failed to hear me
When I said, “I am afraid of failure
But the prize is worth the risk,”
And she said wholeheartedly
“I agree, there is nothing worse
Than failure.”
I failed to hear her first, of course,
As she had not heard me,
And so I blundered on and said
I needed her beside me
To push me on, despite the chance
That I might stumble and collapse
Into the mire of failure.
She took my hand and smiled at me
And said, “Of course, I’ll do anything
To keep you from the airy paths,
To pull you back when you come close
To the precipice of failure.”
And so our road divided when
We faced a choice of cliff or fen:
I said, “Well, push me on,” and she
Cried out, “no, wait, come back to me!”
We curse each other still, be sure:
For failures that have followed since—
For failure to communicate…
For fear—for courting failure.