At that time Jesus exclaimed: 
“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones….
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves. 
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
—Matthew 11:25-30

And am I learnèd, then?  And am I wise
that you have hidden these things from my eyes?
Not childlike, I, so you have not revealed
the mysteries from ages long concealed;
not trusting simply all the work of grace,
so never fully looking on your face.

Happy the child who comes to you to rest,
an infant curled upon his mother’s breast.
Happy the ones who comes with empty hands:
Beneath the shadow of your wing he stands
and asks for all he needs.  He shall receive.
Happy the ones who hear this and believe.

But I have carried laws like bars of gold—
a treasure and a heavy weight to hold.
And if I set them down, O Lord, what then
but that I’ll have to pick them up again?
For wise and learnèd ones must bear them so
who cannot bear, O savior, not to know.

But I am weary, Lord, of being wise
and can be but an infant in your eyes.
Give me that hope—let fearful heart relent!
Give me that trust that makes me innocent.
Let me drink peace from wellsprings dark and deep
that I may lay this burden down and sleep.

Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896) – Art Renewal Center, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=256244

Nel mezzo del cammin I-35
as it parallels the Mississippi River,
I find myself midway through being alive,
though no one knows our years except their giver.

The days we’ve lost forever fall behind;
ahead the mornings yet to come enkindle
and flare and fade as quickly into mind.
If I have numbered mine aright, they dwindle.

Where prophets read the stars and lightning bolts
to shape and steer the lives of men and cultures,
I read the fields beside me: Mares and colts
are grazing underneath the gaze of vultures.

Yet for all that, still something calls me forth;
the road runs on along through death or birthing.
From delta mud we rise up and head north.
The journey’s end will find me still unworthy,

but I will drive ‘til I run out of gas
and pray the miles hold some sanctification,
for swallows dive beneath the overpass
and rise again alive with jubilation.

Though I fly as the swallows, swoop and dive,
though vultures eye me all the days I’m given,
let there be mercy, Lord.  Let me arrive
and every wasted mile be yet forgiven. Amen.

Interstate 35 at milemarker 102 (just north of the Ladd Road exit) in Goldsby, Oklahoma. Image taken by user  Scott5114 and uploaded 15 September 2005. Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.

But there are moments no one can explain.
We know so well the wall, the lock, the chain,

though we have fought against them tooth and nail.
There comes a time when all our weapons fail:

We bow our heads, accept what is decreed,
and dream no more of day or being freed.

Some part of us is well content to dwell
within the confines of the prison cell

’til, brighter than torches, brighter than the moon
or summer sun in unrelenting June,

a swift and wordless wildfire peace appears,
and for a moment every shadow clears—

and all things show as mysteries at their cores,
and what we thought were prison walls are doors—

then, gone.  The dark is darker for this sight,
the world a wall between us and the light.

Image Credit: Detail from The Liberation of Saint Peter, By Raphael – Web Gallery of Art:   Stanza di Eliodoro, Vatican. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14540879

Jesus said to his apostles:
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
—Matthew 10:37-42

Lord, we’re baptized now into you,
baptized into your dying, too.
This valley you will lead us through,
of shadows deep,
will take us to our Golgothas,
and yet you say, Take up your cross;
take up the weight of pain and loss:
The way is steep.

We leave behind what we have loved,
our parents, children, in the dust.
We leave them to the one we trust
above all else.
In truth, they were not ever ours
but yours—O, hold them to your heart
and keep them, though we dwell apart,
yet with yourself.

And all we’ve gained is ours to lose,
yet all we’ve lost is yours in truth.
When mercy every life renews
and deserts bloom,
we’ll hear at last your great Amen:
You’ll give us what we’ve lost, and then
you’ll bring us back to life again
out of the tomb.

So day by day and breath by breath
befriending our eventual death
we follow in our shepherd’s steps,
remembering
that we are mortal, doomed to die,
yet even that shall pass us by
when you have raised us to the sky,
O savior king.

A view to Romsdalen from Vadstranda by the Rauma river in 2008 August. Trollveggen behind. By Ximonic, Simo Räsänen – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7683641

You fill my life with irises and callas,
daylilies and my own chrysanthemums
that flourish in the brutal heat of Dallas
because you love—the greenest of all thumbs.

And I have taken root within our garden
far deeper than I guessed such things could grow.
New rootthreads sprout and in the dark earth harden;
now they withstand your well-loved winter snow.

You grow here, too, beside me through the summer.
We drop our leaves and wither in the heat
until September brings the sound of thunder,
and let the wind and rain and hailstones beat.

When January comes, how will it find us?
Asleep and waiting for the end of gloom,
our roots entangled so they join and bind us.
When summer comes again, love, we will bloom.

Untitled (White Iris) – Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 20 inches. Private collection. By Georgia O’Keeffe – https://collections.okeeffemuseum.org/object/8625/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158888392

I can’t find a good photo online, but if you’re in north Texas, you’ve seen along empty stretches of highway whole trees enveloped in wild grapevines. These are mustang grapes.

As leafy vines are swallowing live oaks,
devouring miles along the interstate,
and mustang grape swarms up the tree and chokes
the branches, bears a bitter weight:
inedible wild grape that cannot sate
but only mocks the hunger it provokes,

so I am overtaken by this vine
of thought, and bound within the twisting shoot
that sprang up out of nothing just to twine
about my being, crown to trunk to root,
‘til I am glutted on its sourest fruit
and starving for the taste of bread and wine.

These grapes are bitter as the oak tree gall,
dark as the shadows hiding them from view,
but even so are harvested in fall
and sugar’s added—buckets full—to brew
sweet wine from sorrow.  Thus we follow you:
O sweet-as-honey Lord, redeem it all.

Mustang grapes growing on the vine. By Jon Lebkowsky – originally posted to Flickr as Mustang grapes, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9956017

I.

I am a creature of the silver pennies:
I see one on the ground and pick it up,
collecting them by ones and two and manys,
then with these tarnished hands I take your cup.

And you, who sent the wine around the table,
you know my measure: Pockets like the deeps
for all these coins, well-lined with silk and sable
to hold my treasure as I play for keeps.

I tell myself I’ll quit, but when I find them
the penny’s in my hand before I know.
I say I’ll forge a silver chain to bind them—
stronger than gold—and break it even so.

By now I am a richer man than Judas
who had a measly thirty for his kiss.
Was it for this you sought us and pursued us,
and poured your blood out, Lord?  Was it for this?

II.

Give me the courage to begin again
this minute, though the sixty last have failed
and sixty before that.  This day has been
a failure, Lord, since first the morning sailed
into the sky, though no storm wind has galed
to wreck its course: I stove the day’s hull in.

I cannot doubt the mercy you extend
but only my intention to accept.
Sincerity some of these sins should end—
then am I insincere, or just inept?
I cannot count the hours that I have wept
over these thefts, and yet their wage I spend.

These silver pennies I have held so dear
have bought me treasures I can’t bear to lose,
but even they cannot allay my fear
that someday I must reckon up my dues.
My will is weak, but still I want to choose
to draw more near to you, and yet more near.

III.

I bring you what I have, tithe to your name,
my fatted calf, my lamb and turtledove.
I bring them all and lay them in the flame:
They will suffice for one who cannot love.

Where I should give my heart, a widow’s mite.
It is—believe me, Lord—my livelihood.
Accept its gleaming, not as love so bright,
and all the silver pennies I’ve accrued.

I pay this toll to open mercy’s doors.
Is it enough?  No.  Only your own coin
can manage that.  Then you must lend me yours:
Your love unto my offering must join.

And then my empty hands will overflow
and precious coins upon the altar spill.
My mites afire with love of yours will glow:
Behold, O God, I come to do your will.

Charlemagne. 768-814 AD. AR Denier (21mm, 1.19 g, 7h). Toulouse mint. Struck 793/4-812 AD. *O/ +CLRLVS (S retrograde) RE+ FR, cross pattée *R/ +TOLVSL (S horizontal), Karolus monogram. {{CNG}}By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=637468

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.
So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
—Matthew 10:26-33

We feel it in our marrow,
this sadness in us curled:
that the falling of a sparrow
is the breaking of the world.

And oh! How many sparrows!
How many broken wings!
How many slings and arrows!
How many serpent stings!

Yet not a one escapes you
or falls beyond your sight.
How precious in your tables,
our dropping into night!

For you, O God, are jealous
and hoard each sparrow’s breath:
You do not let your treasures
unseen go down to death,

and when our flying ceases,
and when we fall to earth,
the weight of death increases
that waits for our new birth.

But now that weight you carry,
your fingers gently curled
around the fallen sparrow,
around the broken world.

Bruno Liljefors – House sparrows among the thorns (1886) – Bukowskis, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138306035

Much later he would think about this day,
the dreadful silence broken by their grunts
as, shoulder to the heavy stone, they’d sway,
rock back and forth again, ‘til all at once
that gag upon the grave mouth rolled away
and left behind a gasp at all these stunts.
Then from within, one tooth in all that gape,
came Lazarus bone-white in linen drape.

He’d helped unwind the wrappings and set free
the body from the binding of its shroud.
If kings have longed to see what now we see,
he’d thought, then we are greater than the proud,
yet dare not raise our eyes.  How can it be?
His friend was strange to him in all that crowd.
What cannot happen happens at his word—
how can I hear what prophets never heard?

Yet so he had, and words had changed the world,
had filled it with a living, golden light,
and now the one who’d spoken it lay curled
in linen, too, sent down to endless night.
But still a golden sunrise had unfurled,
and somehow still the world was morning bright
though he had wrapped his friend in cerement span—
then he remembered Lazarus and ran.

The Raising of Lazarus’, tempera and gold on panel by Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1310–11, Kimbell Art Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7125641

The calla blooms like carven stone,
carrara opening to the sun.
No mason’s work has ever shown
the grace of blossoms here begun,

yet every lily’s winter’s prey
and every work our hands have made
will have its night as well as day,
and someday even stone will fade.

We will be lost, and memory’s doom
is but to vanish as the dew,
yet we have seen the lily bloom
and witnessed what our forebears knew:

Though all of this will be forgot
when we are all long-since dislimned,
yet for a moment we were caught
in lily’s light before it dimmed.

Calla By Christian Rohlfs – scan from German watercolors, drawings and prints [1905-1955]. A midcentury review, with loans from German museums and galleries and from the collection Dr. H. Gurlitt. American Federation of Arts, New York 1956, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29874669

As cabbage whites upon the calla light
and tremble on the rim of purest white
unmatched by anything but their delight
and white in white is lost to my poor sight,

so may we on the lily of the Lord
alight, the rim from which all mercy poured,
and know ourselves with him in such accord
that we are one at last with our adored.

Close wing position of Talbotia naganum (Moore, 1884) – Plain Cabbage White This photograph was clicked from Namdapha National Park, Arunachal Pradesh By Ankit0908 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141854847