Not this year,
the images that have nurtured me before
Don’t get me wrong! I’ve loved
the blowing wind,
but deadly storms of climate change
have taken the air out of that one.
Tongues of flame remind me too much
of cremation in India and Nepal.
Certainly even reading about
the crowded streets
sends me digging in my pocket
for a mask,
in these tentative,
emotionally so complicated
days of re-community.
This year it is the languages
that … speak to me, in me, through me
not even so much celebrating
the holy, beautiful syllabification
of global diversity,
or the most successful sermon ever
giving birth to a church,
as one hundred twenty people
being willing to speak
without being in control of their words.
We all have learned this –
how we said the right thing at the right time
buried in ordinary conversation,
or a small public courage
of naming truth we didn’t know we knew.
This year my simple pentecost
is just lending my tongue to something
someone needs to hear,
because I am waiting in the right place,
and willing to open my mouth.
Gifts in Open Hands 
Maren, Incredible poem. Thank you. I so tire of pastors & other theologians “spiritualizing”, Mansplainin, and abstracting biblical stories from the flesh & bone of ever day life. Your poems bears skin and bone and loving words to neighbor. Mark
Thank you, Mark. I am waiting to read another one of your poems.
Such insightful and poignant words. What a gift you have.
Thank you and I will say the same — back at you and oh, your words lit up by art.
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Oh yes, Maren, and how poetry like yours is so often “the right thing at the right time”. How we long to give and receive that rightness, but we don’t control it – it is a matter of “lending our tongue” or our pen, “waiting in the right place”, and finding the “courage of naming truth we didn’t know we knew”. Thank you for naming all those truths!
Thank you, Barbara, it often seems to me that Pentecost is like that … there is so much to it that it nudges us to risk everything by just being there.
Exceptionally wonderful words! You have a blessed gift to communicate! Thank you!
You are welcome — thanks for the kind words.