Survivor in The Sea of Memories

Floating…
bobbing up and down,
survivor in the Sea of Memories…
I can see as the wave crests
their half-submerged faces
my life half remembered…
a smile here or there,
a mannerism;
and as we travel down now
in its elegant watery trough,
something I can,
in the lamenting wind,
vaguely hear but not enough,
on a distant shoal,
something that was mine to hear,
but now only flotsam of sound.
It is then
I know in my soul
I shall never reach shore.

God the Father Must Laugh

God the Father must laugh.
I'm sure he does
But not in a rolling Dolby stereo
you have to suffer through at the movies;
More like he can't hold it in any more.
More like my pre-pubescent altar servers, young girls
New to inanity, new to everything…
I call them the 'Giggle Sisters.'
The more they try to hold it in, the louder the expulsion of this merriment,
hilarity out of bounds, a total loss of control.
That's the way God the Father must laugh,
Not with a voice like the guy that intones from his pancreas to the world,
"This is CNN."
But more like a silly little girl's laugh and I'll tell you why.

Us.
We ritual strut with constipated faces.
We even change the lilting voice he gave us,
Disguising ourselves, so that maybe he wouldn't know our insufficiency
in near-sight. We dress up and light candles and
wear gold things…
Is this to impress the One
who flung the sun over the hill again this morning?
To get the attention of the One
who calibrates our breath, and checks,
From time to time, our pulse?
He put the laugh, a freebie with the package,
Just down below the sternum,
just sitting there ready to burst open
glorifying the loaned life…
The logic of everything.
Well, friend, what do we do?
We grimace and dirge about the safe things,
the pain that inevitably accompanies the journey.
But the journey? We just don't talk about it
because we know the journey is joy and
we've been so long taught
the inappropriateness of laughter.
The little boy runs up the middle aisle
In a moment of our solemnity
pretending he in a make-believe rocket,
going 'Vroooooomh'
and his mother leaps to the rescue,
pulling him away from Captain God,
saving her son from ecstacy.

^

Biography

Robert Phelps after trying to come back to my original home in New York, after being away in the islands for 32 years, I realized that this is where I really belong. I'm now an old fuddy-duddy pastor of the same parish where I worked as a brand new priest 32 years ago. I enjoy the work, but pastoral work, instead of providing fodder for me, shuts down my voice. So, I felt I had to take off for a couple of weekdays to the island of Saipan, hopefully to begin writing again. I am having some success with small poetry journals here in the US.