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

Tenured Otherwise

​There comes a day
when everything you knew 
about the world shifts
like equinox light
and you know 
you’ve entered a new season.
 
I watched evil
systematically tenured
then judge me unworthy.
Crushed, I lost faith
until seeds sown in hope
bloomed cynical
 
and I walked away.
I left my gifts at the altar
where they rotted, 
unwanted 
and backed away
undone, utterly undone
 
uttering cries of dereliction
on the outskirts
of the dregs of my life
and all its work
devoted to proclaiming
God’s goodness.
 
I rested in the womb
of God’s tomb for years,
perplexed, not knowing
what to do--or how-- 
silent, defeated, 
waiting, fallow, wondering: 
 
Will there be resurrection?
Or is it all an idol hope
taught by powers of death
who bilk us of life
to shore up megalomaniacal 
self-aggrandizement?
 
I don’t know, yet this I do:
I was faithful,
not sinless, but faithful still
to the God of love
who calls us to love
no matter what.
 
Instead of writing about it,
isolated in my lovely tower
(and it was lovely!),
the call to love
students and children 
and dying parents won
 
Until I was undone
and utterly victorious,
for I have risen from the grave
to a new life
of hands-on service
to comfort those dying
 
into their own resurrections.
My mission failed
while God’s prevailed.
This is all I really wanted
after all—for the Son
to shift with global transformation.
 
And so it’s done,
though something sad remains
whispered through time
of what could have been
if only we would
systematically tenure love.

                                                
                     © February 2019, Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.
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