Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Tom Atkins Jun 2020
You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
The air here is still pure.
You can smell the forests.
You can smell the mock orange in the garden,
successor to the lilacs, now faded and brown.

You breathe out. Slowly, with purpose.
Spittles of poison leave you.
The anger. The fear. The uncertainty.
A part of you relaxes. Not enough,
but a start.

You breathe in. Deeply. Slowly.
There is peace in the Vermont air.
This is why you came, though you did not know it at the time.
For the peace. Unable to find your own,
you came to a place where peace is the natural state,
a place where you could breathe it in
with each swelling of your lungs.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
This is what you have learned,
violence in anything, even breath,
is a form of ******. Of spirit, Of your spirit at least.
You have seen enough of it in your lifetime,
and your tolerance is low. The pain and the anger
always lies near the surface. It is an act of will
to keep it at bay.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
The mountain air fills you.
“I look to the mountains from whence cometh my help”
declares the Psalmist and you breathe his words,
knowing your only real power comes in love,
in peace, no matter the world’s penchant for anger.
You refuse to make that anger your own, and so
you breathe in the morning peace
as you clutch the cross around your neck.

You breathe out. slowly, with purpose.
This time, this breathing, is a girding of arms,
for the anger still lives beneath the surface,
and you will never **** it. It has a life beyond your own.
Your own pain and experiences will never leave you.
No amount of breathing will expel it,
so the trick is to breathe it out, just enough
that it can become a thing controlled,
put to work, harnessed by love, power
to wrestle the darkness around you.

You breathe in. Slowly. Deeply.
Unsure of the battle, but sure of the cause,
sure of the value of every soul you encounter,
even those who weld their swords seeking
submission and blood, blended by their own anger,
unfamiliar with history and gospel. You breathe in strength,
the power of sunshine over the quarry.
You breath in the words of your youth
and they become sinew and muscle.
God in you. finally. Again.

You breathe out, slowly, with purpose.
You need this renewal. Every day you need it.
and that is in ordinary times. Today
you need it more. Your weakness,
your easy anger is not a thing to be purged,
only a thing to be controlled. There is work to be done
and work needs its fuel, it’s passion,
a flame fed, but not too much. You breathe more of it out,
feeling your soul calm, knowing when to stop,
in that place between peace and war inside yourself
where change without carnage becomes possible.
The times, the poor handling of the coronavirus and the flames fueled by Geroge Floyd’s ******, the politics of diminishment and anger, have pushed my peaceful, non-political nature past its comfort zone. A latent anger has risen in me, as it has in many of us.

But this is what I know. I do not do well when I live in anger. I lash out. I don’t think clearly. I forget who I am in the red mist and people get hurt. It can become something I do not control well and nothing good comes of that.

Good only comes in love. Historically. Relationally. In every way imaginable, love is the answer.

But a little anger? Enough that we are spurred to action, to take our gifts and put them to work for good? That may just be a good thing.

Tom

PS: The picture is of the backside of the cross I wear around my neck. It was given to me at time, a decade and a half ago, when I was hurting and angry both. And I was afraid, lost, unsure. The scripture comes from the book of Joshua, chapter 1, verse 9:  “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”  That has been one of my mantras since then. But a little meditation, breathing out the harmful and breathing in the good, has been part of the process.
Tom Atkins Jun 2020
I am thankful for the trespassers.
for those who dared breach my walls
gently but firmly, who passed through
my locked doorways carrying candles,
determined to do no harm, determined
to raise me from the dead.
There have been times in my life, and we are living in one of those today, I believe, when I needed someone to push past my own walls and self-limitations with gentleness and love, so I could become more, better, stronger.

The gentleness and love are just as important as the persistence, I have learned.

Be well,

Tom
Tom Atkins May 2020
A black man dies on a city street,
the policeman’s knee on his neck,
breath, life taken from him.

There are riots. Of course there are.
A people ignored too long will erupt sooner or later.
A people not heard too long with erupt sooner or later.

This is a truth we ignore,
an ugly truth.
A universal truth we should understand

from our holy books
and the history repeating itself
again and again and again.

People are made to be loved and cared for,
and when we are not, we either die, or erupt.
too often both.

We know this from our holy books.
We preach it from our pulpits.
and yet we are content to ignore it,

avoiding discomfort, a bit here and there.
avoiding conversation, and listening,
hoping somehow we can deny the truth of neglect.

But the poets and the prophets agree with history.
We can continue it ignore them only so long
before the roof falls in.
I don’t often get political in my poetry. But what happened this week in Minnesota is not an isolated incident. It is a spiritual failure, of not treating everyone as if they were people of value until we become all “us vs them”. It is a failure of the love we profess. A slow unraveling until, as the poet W. B. Yeats writes “Things fall apart.”
Tom Atkins May 2020
A storm blows in from the east. You can smell the rain.

In an hour or less, it will be here
and unpredictability will reign. The seas will roil
and flotsam, so well hidden by the water
will be tossed on the beach like ragdolls.
And the driftwood around you, dry
from yesterday’s sun, will drift once again.
The landscape will change.

It has been a season of storms,
the kind of storms that rattle windows
and leaves behind damage, ripping at roofs,
tearing away foundations, unrelenting, terrible storms,
one after another. You have survived them all,
but just barely, your faith and those you love,
have not let you flail for more than a moment,
when the winds were at their worst.
Your landscape has changed. And changed again.

The earth is a solid thing, so they say, but
that has not been your experience.
It is a wild thing, uncontrollable, a raging mix
of beauty and betrayal, a seething sea of madness,
waiting for the next wave, the next gust of wind
to tear at you and test you and see
whether you hold fast or fall, A test
of your ability to not walk, but dance on the water.
In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, there is a story of Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples, who in order to prove his faith, stepped into the raging seas and show that his faith was so strong that like Christ, he could cross the surface of the water. He took one step, and his faith failed him and Christ had to reach out and save him from drowning. Some people see that episode as a failure, but I have always felt it was a raging success. He walked on water! Even if only for a moment.

The original title of this poem was to be “The Lost Year”, referring to the year of sickness and struggle I have fought through, with the added time of quarantine and coronavirus we have all been through. Most of the plans I had for the year are lost. It was to be a lament.

But if there is one thing I have learned in forty years of writing poems, it is that the muse often has other ideas, and it turned into a poem of gratitude for a faith and people who have loved me through this year. I may not be dancing on water yet, but I have come close.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom
Tom Atkins May 2020
A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.
Tom Atkins May 2020
It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.
I love New York City, and watching what they have gone through and are still going through, has been heartbreaking,
Tom Atkins Apr 2020
The house is built
on posts and beams.

Thick, hand-hewn posts of local cedar,
the beams as big crossing space,
held together by a single peg
since the early nineteenth century.

You’d not know it’s age to look at it.
Windows have been replaced.
Walls torn asunder and replaced.
There is plaster and electricity,
all the modern conveniences.

But in the end,
it is post and beam.
Incredibly, solidly constructed
in such a way that space is spanned
and everything between and underneath
can be ripped out and replaced,
renewed and reworked,
becoming new again
without losing its strength.
My house is a post and beam house, built, according to the deed, around 1800. It was redone at least twice, in the 1920s and the fifties or sixties. When I bought it, it was a duplex, and the first thing I did, 24 hours after moving in, was knock out walls to make it a single home. In theory, I could rip every wall out and rebuild from scratch. I could, but I won’t. I like what it is.

I have an affinity for old homes, and post and beam construction in general. So strong, and yet so full of possibilities. It’s what I want my life to be.
Next page