“If your child asks for a fish, do you give them a snake?”
Two butterflies float their tissue-thin wings
through the air above hydrangea blossoms,
a pair of mates who dance to pollinate
while the newly leafed trees across the street
sashay alive, green limbs awash in buttery yellows
lazily swaying in the warm May breeze:
a thriving vision in the picture frame window
I peer through while in our family room
as my toddler daughter sleeps on my chest.
She grows and gleans energy as she rests
in this sanctuary, and I join her,
reading poems that name grace as the light
slipping in through cracks in life's prison walls –
refreshing my soul like a cup of chilled water.
I've needed this space to restore my faith
after visiting a strict church this past Sunday.
There God, if their preacher resembles the divine,
is a father who likes to chastise his children
with a hand raised to threaten, poised to spank
any poor sod who might step out of line,
his all seeing eye policing our deeds
because "he loves us" according to the pulpit
(a puppeteer's ploy to maintain control).
I am done with such domineering men,
their message a burden like a slave's steel collar,
twisting, deforming, the person it binds.
Instead let me trust my heart and my child
to the Spirit I sense in this garden,
a God who divests himself of power
to use a wee bug to feed his flowers,
the grey fallen leaves strewn across the grass
enriching the soil where they decompose,
the same place where deep roots nourish tall trees
with showers that rain on both the unjust and just:
new life sprouting out of what was once dead.
Nathaniel A. Schmidt is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church and serves as a hospice chaplain. He holds degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin University, and the University of Illinois Springfield. His newest collection of poems, Transfiguring, is available from Wipf & Stock, as is his first collection, An Evensong. He lives with his librarian wife, Lydia, and their daughter in southwest Michigan, meaning life is a perpetual story time.
Amethyst Review 