Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs
Picture

Lenten Ruth

Picture
Around the abandoned well
gallop horse weeds in a tangle
that no doubt holds snakes deep within,
yet she pulls her way through unafraid.
After all, she knows how
to take the clearing rake of bronze
and catch the writhing serpent,
casting it away far overhead
so that it slithers back to whence it came
long ago in some nearby far-off realm
where dew shines like jewels in the morning sun
revealing any out-of-place shadows.

So she patiently proceeds,
not knowing exactly why,
except that some Force compels her
to make her way in to the well
capped like an ancient altar
upon which fish were sacrificed
for sacred meals.
This is not her land,
yet she knows its course
in her own ancient river
of ancestral blood
that cries out
not for vengeance
but restitution, peace.  

So still she makes her way in,
through all the death,
rolling away the stone
to the sweet aroma of living water
at the bottom of the dark, 
as a flash of light proclaims
its rippled praise
in earthen rain from above.  

To most passersby
she is itinerant farm worker
moving unnoticed across the land.
But to those who peer more closely,
over the penumbral edge of obscurity
she is poet, preacher, love,
riding forth on labor's 
steady Belgian steed
of mourning hope
in Providence-dripping fields. 

    
                 © 2011 Tess  Lockhart. All rights reserved.


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