Peace Be Within Your Walls

                  and quietness within your towers.
                                                              —Psalm 122 

My house has five gables, pitched rooflines,
angled rooms, and balconies,

front and back gardens enclosed,
rocked with river stone

while a dry streambed drains the drench
off shingles in a storm.

Abstract sculptures mirror the cross gables.
This, a thirty year effort that parallels

the fits and starts to get to where
each morning I read

the appointed psalms, pray for my sisters,
and write this song.        

I Am Afraid of Your Judgments

                                                              —Psalm 119

As soon as vibrant green is upon
the euonymus hedge—

            planted as a freeform line
            of bushes along the sidewalk,
            each to maintain its shape
            and inclination,

            unlike hedges in Victorian
            Cape May I admired, but
            did not want a life keeping
            offshoots within borders—

subtle criticism begins to gnaw.
What in bustle of a winter season
does not prick, in late spring
finds its way into crevices
as the inevitable weed,
even in a garden of stone.

They Asked

        They asked, and quails appeared, 
           and he satisfied them with bread from heaven.
                                                              —Psalm 105

On a day when I asked someone to lunch,
all I got was a displaced rabbit hopping
from car to car in the parking lot.

He'd learned the way of pigeons and squirrels,
begging when I left with a sackful of bread
and a mind to share with one in the desert

like Moses kept just outside the promised land,
wandering where no one speaks his language
or honors the customs of his ways.