Playing God

I don’t want to play God, but we all do.
God is in our conscious awareness of
Life and death of
Taking and giving of
Existence in
Love or
Fear or
Retribution of
World leaders
Pining for
Power to
Lord over those
They perceive as pawns in
The virtual reality within
Their minds but
Me, I don’t want to play God in
Even the slightest of ways
When tonight I clean
My guinea pigs cage knowing in
Three short days
Henry will be no more because
I made the decision to
End his life knowing
A cancerous tumor grows
On and in him
And as his weight shrinks
I know he can’t win this battle so
I play God
I know the truth:
His time is short.

I know his fate as
I watch him
Watching me as
He happily chuts along
Making sure I do everything correctly.
This is what he does
This is his routine.
For him,
It’s just another day in his life but
I carry the weight of
Knowing in three days
Henry’s routine will be no more.
I know this and I don’t want to know.
Knowing is hard.
Playing God is hard even if it’s out of love.

Yet, I think of
Those in power playing God with
Our lives
Knowing we will suffer and die by
The choices they make
And yet,
They won’t give a single tear to
A single thought of
You or me.

Knowing I am crying over a guinea pig
And they,
They won’t waste their tears on us because
The God they play is themselves
And it’s for themselves.

I don’t know their God
Nor do I want to.

I know my God
And she knows to play God isn’t a game.
I don’t play.
I work directly in
The thickness and heaviness of
Responsibility
I feel the depth of
Knowing life and death of
Understanding whether
Its 1 or 8 billion whether
A guinea pig or a human
All life is significant
And the responsibility to
Each life is
A responsibility to each other to
Trust that the choices we make are in love
And for the betterment of all involved.

Being God is work.

And we need to stop placing our responsibility on
A God we can’t see
And start putting it on
The God we see in the mirror.

This starts with asking one simple question:
What kind of God are you?

CL January 2025

The Wind Blows

I am not the interpreter of the dreams I wish for myself nor
The force of solitude I crave in the stillness.

I am fear and regret sitting beneath trees that know neither, while
Causing an ache in my neck as I look up toward the peak of their growth,
Wondering how do they do that?

How do they live with such strength and poise in a world that lives to
Tear them down
Dry them out
And build its own dream out of their bones?

Here they stand
Stoic
Strong
Whispering wisdom in the wind
While I cry
Lost in my life
Unable to know if the quaking in my body is meant to
Break me or move me along?

There is no answer.

There is only wind
And trees
And dreams to be as
I move while they stay as
I cry and they sway whispering
Let go.

Let the wind blow.
CL August 2022

America, the Hopeless

America,
Our longest day has
Faded into memory like
Childhood summers,
We thought it’d last a lifetime.

But here I stand
reflecting on the past
feeling the warmth of
the setting sun on my back
I look to my eldest tree
an American Ash
for comfort leaning into
its sparse shade as
my elongated shadow
merges with its and
I find myself in tears
Knowing it’s dying just like
our democracy.

Infested with
Emerald Ash Borer beetles
discovered too late to undo
the devastation taking place
within its vascular system,
all I can do now is watch as
this once strong tree falls to
the ground
one limb at a time.

Piece-by-broken-piece,
my hope crumbles with it as
our shadows begin to be replaced by
the darken of
day to night and
with it comes
the nightmares,
not made in childhood but
created by
the withering of
the dreams we made when
hope was all we had.

CL June 2022

I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U

Whispers of I love you flow through the ghost of me.
In darkness they fade faintly into walls of peeling paint as
I drift from this moment with each letter until
Y-O-U vanishes with I.

Never to be again.

I know myself too well not to speak stronger than a whisper.
Into the future love will fill this room with such force that
You and I will find each other once more and
We will dance beside love for life.

Never to be broken again.

I love you
I love you
I love, Christa.

Sincerely,
The Ghost of me.

Mother is Here

I am not the daughter of the future
But a mother to my past
Bleeding out what I once remember
From the memory of my aching womb
I will no longer mourn what I was
But rise
In recognition of who I am
Never birthing human life
I will give what life I have
To the voice I silenced
So long ago
To a girl
Awkward in form
An alien amongst the group
She quivered in the corner
Learning to be
But never being
Until I
(taking from a body with nothing to give)
Molded this truth:
Raising a life starts within
Even when we are without.

Speak, my child, Mother is here.

CL March 2022