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

                             Rectify





​

rectify (v.)
c.1400, from O.Fr. rectifier,  lit. "to make straight" (14c.), from L.L. rectificare "make right" (3c.), from L. rectus  "straight" (see right (adj.1)) + root of facere "to make" (see factitious).

I cannot make this right
no matter how hard I try. 
You died with me
mired in anger with you.
And now you’re gone,
and I don’t even remember
what I was mad about.
There is no redemption possible,
for now there is nothing to redeem,
nothing to purify,
nothing to save,
nothing  

except this swirl of shit
I’m trying to slog through--
both yours leftover and mine.
Most days I dissolve
into it like a soldier hiding 
in a swamp from snipers of grief.
To the outside world
I look like a stock-straight hero
in my dress-white uniform.
They don’t know where I’ve been
and what I’ve seen
of life’s war destruction,
of how bent you have to be
to become one with death
in order to wrestle some life
out of the muck of human existence
and the incomprehensible crucifixion
that lies at the crux of it all.  

Somewhere in the struggle 
I got sucked in, though.
I can’t drag myself up
out of this primordial ooze.
I need to be rectified,
drawn up, washed off,
clothed in my right mind,
set right in whatever force
of love resurrects us all
past the pain. 


                        © 2012 Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved.
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