Weekend Words

I don't know what this weekend was. A beautiful mess? I spent all weekend at a wedding in SoCal for one of my very best of friends. Normally, I find time for writing every day.  This weekend was blessedly chaotic in artful and heart-wrenching ways. I laughed until my sides ached, cried salt towards the sea, regaled fairy tales of chandeliers into A's listening ears, was healed and lent healing, was broken and prayed for God's soothing, loved, lived, listened, thrived.
Words of poetry surrounded me surely as the ocean mighty, whose waves cried against my feet each dawning morning. Burgeoning words blossoming as first flowers after forest fires, violet, gold, and crimson in an efflorescent wildfire. And no time for journaling, for sewing seeds and reaping some glorious paean of writing following a nearly ideal weekend.
I'm bubbling over with words, but I can't even begin placing them down correctly. I'm shy on sleep, my metabolism bristled against my despairing circadian cycle and staunchly refused all food all weekend.  Every night, we stayed up late and shared a desperate joy, a last gift whose spiritual offering was not just for A, but was equally a gifting unto ourselves. I want to write. I want to shout and write poetry and scream and dance and live and run around in circles until I wear silly holes in the floor. My heart is ablaze with love, and where art thou now, brother?
Change is this: an end and a beginning. I craved an important piece of this ending, and an earnest christening of this new beginning (A actually broke a wine bottle in the car and spilled wine everywhere. There is some "christening" pun being made here, certainly, but I'm whistling innocently with measured nonchalance). Hugs and photographic memories, heart-wrenching words that followed me all weekend - I'm full of words and empty. I'll never find time for writing everything this weekend meant to me, and I suspect I couldn't. It meant everything to me, and always will. It was sanctified, a holy communion.
I wrote a couple of poems trying to capture my thoughts, and ended up with 6 broken haikus, 1 sonnet (Elizabethan), 1 free verse, 1-ish metric adventure, and nothing worth repeating that adequately captured my feelings as this weekend captured my heart.

These words have soared with me on my journey into normalcy, whatever that is, as another beautiful exemplar of this weekend. I don't know why I put them here. That's how cognizant I am of my current thought process.

The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.


And I come back, remembering two different worlds. Sagebrush and succulents, a saline seaside where sands and shores mingle, and roll uphill into a tanned and sunny world. Palms and aloes dominate the fauna, gulls, pigeons, turkey vultures, and herons the fowl. Adobe and sun-bleached or sandblaster woods are boxes leading into the hills above the ocean. The worlds as like as green and grey, and colored in like pallet, each in exquisite fashion.  The mightiness of the sea, here, in the southern lands, and the mountains, evergreens and trees, here, in the 45th, a green belt of verdant flora with scarce a pace of dirt between where brush or shrub clamber skyward, greeting the sun's harp strings. I would miss my world, though the greatness of theirs burns brightly in my heart. But when the mists roll in over the mountains, and the dewdrops trickle down tulip petals and along the efflorescent hydrangeas and rhododendrons, and each blade of grass prisms the light into tiny rainbow droplets - I know I am home.