Soul Simplicity

The soul's dangers are complex:

To listen to circumstances over the heart,

To listen to the heart over community,

To listen to community over God,

To listen to God and not obey,

To obey God and not love,

To love the many over

God alone.

The City Surgery

Look from the high hospital window

Upon a city vast and vaporous
Like its people, car lights coursing
Through street-veins, life
Beating, streaming underneath
The nocturnal orb, bright, steady
Like the light over a surgery table

Nine floors up, nine hours out
Past the noon-day operation
That brought us to this
Window, watching a city to which
We do not exist, ghosts
Like the Spirit that hovers over,
Cutting, stitching, breaking, mending
The never-sleeping Nineveh
Even now. Why should He not care?

Turn to the dim hospital room
This side of the soundless glass
Between us and the city surgery,
My wife alongside the crib, asleep
A moment, before machines
By the bed begin their blinking, beeping,
Signs of life of the little one within:

Lothlorien

A fan recently sent me this video he made using my song, Lothlorien. A big thanks to Derek Sawchuk. The song lyrics are posted below.

(For the less nerdy, Lothlorien is a wooded realm of the High Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.)