Virtues

Advent in a Troubling Year

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

Something is tapping, pounding
on the door, the windows and the roof.
It wants in, is insistent!
It is the rain.

Something jostles the bare tree limbs
siren slow moans in the vents
demanding entrance in the night!
It is the wind.

Something hurries down the streets
brushing aside the lowering winter sun
scuffling its way into forgotten places – it comes!
It is darkness and winter’s cold.

We clothe ourselves against the rain and strong winds
put up cheerful lights to dispel an entreating darkness
but hope alone will bear our salvation –
it is coat and hat; it is lamp to light the way.

Portland, Oregon – December 2, 2017

The Advent season, in the Christian tradition, is a season of waiting in anticipation of the coming of the messiah.  It is a remembering of the events leading up to the birth of Jesus.  But, the underlying impetus of the season is the virtue of hope – hope that something good is coming, something to save, to redeem, to heal, to forgive.  Hope is a virtue not confined to any spiritual tradition but is essential to all and, in these troubling times, is a paramount virtue to have and hold.  It is the antithesis to cynicism, fear and anger.

Spes Salve

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

Darkness begets morning
dripping in dawns of seed birth
reaching up through summer days
crackling storm rains veiling
purple twilights in evening showers
of scarlet and billowing sun sets.

Black nights peel the illusions of sleep
in dream layers revealing at dawn
a warm light peering over the horizon
waking creation to forgotten hope
that must be, must be, it must be
or it will not be it will cease to be.

Portland, Oregon – July 18, 2017

“Spes salve”  – Latin: “Saved in hope.”

The Joy of Life

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

Leaves fall in an autumn breeze –
another and another –
forgetting branch and twig
knowing not where they go.

Joy falls from the sky in autumn leaves
through southern suns slant
broken in branches, needles, bird flight;
fall without ceasing through crackling air.

All day long in light
I pass through fallen leaves.
While I sleep through the night
joy falls through its dark mysteries.
I wake to beauty twirling in flight
clinging a moment more
to creation, then letting go –
another one and another –
flung into the realm of the Graces
elemental virtues of the human soul,
parchment on which to write
a human life.

Portland, Oregon – October 12, 2016

Beautiful Teachers

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

Some believed, knew you
in their own heart
without reason cared
for you when you were
seven going on eight.

Always, in your memory, they
knew, felt kindness, saw
your need, kept your face
before theirs.

How could they remember
that small face – my name, me
being in the world when
their world was full
without me, my squinty eyes
chewed fingernails, anxious being
even before grade three?
How did she know I needed
her smile, her recognition of me
when there were so many others?

How she did it I do not know
she did not say it in words.
But if I raised my hand
among the others, if she did not
call my name, I saw her face
see mine, her smile lingering fleet,
calling another but I knew
she saw me and I knew
I was there.

Portland, Oregon – August 7, 2016

Dedicated to wonderful teachers, especially to my second grade teacher, of happy memory, Mrs. Samuelson (1960).  Twenty-five years later, after having been gone from my home town for many years, I came back to share an important moment in my life.  She was there, in the front row, all white hair, in her eighties.  I was so grateful for her being there but I had to ask, “Do you remember me, from 2nd grade?” “Of course I remember you.” And I had absolutely no doubt that she did.

Mercy

/ Korin Thomas / 3 Comments

It is curved, old, deep –
punctured, stretched, twisted.
Emptiness fills its hollow core.
A vibrant electric thrum
bumps along the walls
of this place we know –
do not want to know –
pushed behind our hidden door.

It beckons us from there –
knock, knock, knock.
Our deepest past
calls to us from remote well-springs,
life-bearing pools that seem, in dreams,
to be precipices, hidden caves, cataclysmic seas.

Silence, its name and substance,
waits for us to still, remember, open the door
to let in, at last, sweet mercy –
handmaiden of the living god
however we name her or call the holy.

Portland, Oregon – February 14, 2016

Lenten springtime-Year of Mercy

The Ignorant Fist

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

IMG_20160101_143657693 (003)It starts inside
the end of violence in the world
the end of anger.
I find myself in my fear.
I recognize it, take hold of it
slowly make it release its tight hold
on my past, my now, my coming to be,
even if it takes a lifetime.
Slowly, freedom of the unclenched heart comes,
without flag, country, anthem, or drumbeat.
Waking in the morning
determined to peel away, forcibly at times,
the clutching grasp of fear;
say goodbye to it, daily,
and, on death’s bed, forever.

January 2, 2016 – Portland, Oregon

Photo taken of an exterior wall in NE Portland. Seemed like a good New Year’s resolution. From the poet and Islamic mystic, Rumi.

Advent – For Our Enemies

/ Korin Thomas / Leave a comment

It is now the solemn season of peace
when we wait for the Holy One;
wait for a sacred stillness and loving-kindness
a peace beyond all imagining
to be born within us.
We are the Holy Ones
who give birth to the peace for which we long.
We pray for our enemies,
for men and women –
today in foreign cities
tonight in our own towns –
whose thoughts are tangled up in a violent story
whose ending is too terrible to say.
We bring them, especially them,
the peace we seek.
They are wounded, fearful, angry, and afraid
as we are.
They are confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed,
like us, so like us.
They are mourning the loss of someone
or some ideal of a life they thought could be theirs,
just as we mourn our dead and our broken dreams.
They are strangers in a strange land.
We pray for them.
We welcome them in our deep and open hearts,
hearts not crushed in spite of reasons to be crushed,
hearts that still have a place for our enemies.
If they do not have a welcoming place in us
then they have no place at all.
If they have no place at all
they will bring the fruit of their emptiness to bear
in dark and consuming violence.
Our suffering will continue.
This is the day, a day of waiting
to see whether our hearts will open or close.

The season asks us to choose.

Portland, Oregon – December 2015