Journal of Sacred Work

The older I become, the harder it is to indulge a ritual I’ve enjoyed for decades: Sleeping late on Saturdays. So I rose reluctantly this morning in search of soul gifts. The first one I found is a painting by prize winning poet Claire Bateman* (click to enlarge). The second is a prose poem I’ve been fussing with for awhile. It may only be ready for eyes that are very forgiving. 
   Saturday’s have always been the best days because, for people like me, they hold the least requirements. In the Saturdays of my youth, I leaped from bed excited for the day, wrestled with my dad in his bed, and then road with him through the California sun to the Hollywood YMCA. I didn’t worry about much back then. I had already collected a couple of scars on my skin. I had very few beneath it…

Stradivarius

Sometime soon I will tune my ear to calibrate the difference between one
of the seven hundred or so Stradivariuses that remain on this earth & a fifty-dollar
fiddle. Then I will hear your sixteenth-notes thinning through the wall beneath your careful face. Chant to me the plainsong
of your mourning & I will join you down there where I know I will discover
some new tint in my voice as you will in mine. We will drink from our shared
wound, suffer in a wheat field’s sway, swim night’s long moon. Then we will
stow this hurt beneath grief’s bed and open a lighter door. There
are fifty-six Guam kingfishers (Halcyon
Cinnamomina) left in the world. If we saw one some evening near the waves that
shift around the Santa Monica
pier. If we saw this scarcer-than-a-Strad animal atop a post, folding his rare
wings against his rusty brown chest, I would not take his photo. I would wait
for his ascent. For him to bear us with him.

-Erie Chapman

*Today’s image is protected by copyright, 2006, by Claire Bateman and may not be used in any way without her written permission. The poem is copright, 2006, by Erie Chapman.