Gail shared with me her daily practices about how to begin and end her days with compassion, gratitude, and humility.
The Stranger: Gail
The Word: Compassion
The poem I wrote:
With your whole
heart, dance. Let
creature-love
consume you.
Make whole
those with you.
Look the injured
in their eyes.
The compassion
you’ve saved up
forever, for this:
spend now.
The Challenge: Do you have a poem in you on this word? Write one here.
December 12, 2018 at 9:34 pm
Compassion Haiku
.
Compassion won’t knock.
It will only wait for you
to unlock yourself.
December 14, 2018 at 9:16 am
Salvation Army
A solitary bell repetitively clangs
outside the superstore’s automatic doors.
Standing stoically, a bored Santa,
skinny and beardless,
seems oblivious
to the endless salvo of the repeated tone.
The red kettle, slick with settled moisture,
collects compassion coins
from the fortunate
eager to hurry inside and spread comfort,
out of necessity,
on the unnecessary.
December 16, 2018 at 8:55 pm
Ruffled
Muddy floodwater, today, stymies compassion
In Lady Bird Lake, which, in easier times,
Took on the feelings of the deep blue sky,
The sudden white emotion
Of a startled egret, and all that rhymes
With the many colors of a wood duck flying by.
Today, busy with earth and ruffled by a wind
From the north, it hunkers into itself.
Coming from a hated place like Samaria
Is not enough alone to make you kind.
It takes so little to distract a busy priest,
That any passerby who feels the need to help
Must have eased into a placid mind.
But never empty. No, memories of Samaria
Still ruffle the surface, old pains break
From below like hungry fish. The least
Disturbance cracks a mirror, but ache
May answer ache—not by reflection,
But from the deep: compassion.
January 15, 2019 at 8:46 pm
Mercy-Kill
At age seven
Compassion is
Mercy-killing your snowman
Before the agony of spring thaw.
I stare at my child.
“I didn’t want her to suffer, Mommy.
You taught us that.”
Oh, sweet girl.
How fast they grow…