Ravished By Light (Blog)

He sent lit firecrackers floating on small wooden rafts down the irrigation ditches running under the outhouses. He and his brother Soko would listen for the BANG that shook the termite-eaten boards almost to the ground, then laugh until their sides hurt as the red-faced victim, caught with his pants down, ran fuming back to the sugar cane fields. From the small, brown women in wide-brimmed hats, bent over their buckets, scrubbing rich rust-colored soil out of faded clothes, they stole heavy washboards and stunned the frogs, bloated with flies and heat, sunning themselves in the shallows. Then chopped their heads off and cooked them for dinner. The fields stretched out for miles against the green-ridged mountains and the humidity crawled down their skin like a languorous eel. The sun, captured by the hero Maui with a flaxen rope, twisted and glittered in its sky cage.

Two men on the bus threaten to kill each other

not now, but later, out of sight of cameras.

They scream across the people crammed

like whole chickens into cans, moist and stuffed,

shuffling and turning as far as they can from the fuss.

 

The student scrolling through slides for a test,

pregnant woman balancing her belly on working heels,

old man with a cane, sleepy child wilting for a seat –

all equals in discomfort, shining beacons

of the democracy that is public transportation.

 

A homeless man begs for twenty dollars for a coat,

takes what’s offered and strides off, head up,

whining thrown off like a cheap clothing drive suit.

The woman who gave a few dollars fears

she’s been duped but can’t say no

to a potential angel entertained unaware.

She stops

to wonder who this Sunday School guilt hurts most,

the person taken in, or this man she eyes

as moral litmus, parable-in-disguise.

 

Emergency shelters open up.  Intake workers

leave for empty lots, church steps, benches,

rounding up those who might not last outside.

Even those who’ve “lost their privileges” –

stealing, went off meds, overstayed, too many fights –

invited back, just this once, for winter’s coldest night.

 

Copyright 2015 Carrie Myers. Originally published in “Re-Imagining Theologies: Asian / Americans and Faith,” March 28-May 15, 2015. The Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center.

Which is truer?  To say that God is love,

or that for God, love is too limited

a term, as if an ocean were content

to curl within the confines of a cup

 

or drown in dust while angels sheathe their swords

and weep dry tears.  This desert’s night crawls out

scorched and scornful before me, while I mouth

from cracked and wasted bones, God, give me words

 

to form, to speak your person, my soul’s life,

in certainty, not shapeless shadows, flow.

If words, proof, self, must fail before I know,

Lord, on each of my dyings, shed your light.

 

Let, rain, breath  – Spirit – permeate this air

Let language become thought, and thought, prayer.

 

Copyright 2015 Carrie Myers. Originally published in “Re-Imagining Theologies: Asian/American Artists and Faith.” March 28-May 15, 2015. The Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center.

I remember sitting at my childhood table

eating my daily cereal, when the sky

opened up, its astonished edges

marked by the absent beams where our ceiling

once was.  The kitchen’s frame

wobbled, its light-

weight walls no longer held fast by the roof, and the sunlight

spilled onto the table.

I looked up past the exposed frame

to what seemed my own square of sky

kneeling down through the lifted ceiling

to feather the edges

of my experience, till then edged

with careful walls, with even the light

kept in order and at bay.  But I knew of stained glass ceilings,

jewels poured down on feasting tables

and soaring buttresses pointing somewhere north of sky.

To frame

a life implies containment; to frame

your words requires care.  Both ways of hedging

your bets.  If you ask the sky

how it feels to be ravished by light

it will say it isn’t able

to place a ceiling

on loving and being loved.  And we have no calling

to hold apart our fragile frames

when we lie together on the table

making a meal of our kisses.  Your hair is edged

with the last light

of the swooning sky

and as the dark diffuses down, the sky

tilts its sighs towards the vanishing ceiling.

How light

these bodies, how fast these frames

tip towards the edge

of time and table.

Let’s table time, the distance between ceiling

and sky, the frame

that marks the edge of light.

Copyright 2015 Carrie Myers, originally published in “Re-Imagining Theologies: Asian / – Americans and Faith.”   March 28-May 15, 2015, at the Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center