Category: Poetry

Poetry

No Cheek Left to Turn

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Lord knows how to love
His enemies,
but I don’t.

Times like these,
it seems every friend
is a weapon,

every peace-intentioned word
warped into an act
of war.

Love is still what I
want, just not what
I stand for.

I would lock my knees
and hold my ground
if I found

a rock to count on,
but instead my
options are

to dare the
ocean to a
floating

contest—see
who ends up
sinking first—

or play hopscotch
across a schoolyard
minefield,

learn to fall up from
the earth
and fly.

Every time I try
to mend us up again,
we only rip.

But I would sit with you
still if it were
that simple.

Hand on your shoulder
blade, breath on
your neck,

we would grieve
this blood
together.

We would believe
that love makes
sense.

Poetry

Unflattering Self-Portrait of the Artist

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Lately, I can’t clean the anger
from the air quickly enough,
and it gets caught in my hair
like thick spider webs
stacked over each other
in sticky white layers.

They say to log out
for most of the day,
and I do,
but it isn’t enough—

because the anger has leaked
out past the screen protector
and settled here, offline,
beside me,

physical enough to pinch my ribs
when I try to focus
on anything different,
too abstract
to throw in the trash.

Lately, I think that
I am anger,
maybe.
Not the dream answer I whimsied up
in kindergarten
when teachers asked for
my future plans.

“I want to be deep hurt
darkened with bitterness,”
I didn’t say.
“I want to be others’ moral judge.
I want to be obsessively
never okay.”

Poetry

The Familiar Dark

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Nevermind the sunlight
with its whispers of another try.
Blacken out dawn’s maddening grin,
and in your everlasting dark
scribble over every dream
that dares to pry its way inside.
Simply plug your ears and scream
over hope’s sadistic singing

till you are left alone
under the comfortable
covers of despair,
cocooned in stillness
and commiseration,
not threatened by the awful glow
of any hard-earned glory
that you haven’t known.

Poetry

American Stress Disorder

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Busyness expands like oxygen:
no matter how many tasks
you actually have,

it spreads wide to fill
the space it’s in.

Poetry

Not One Falls

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

for the sweet Kichwa girl whom God has not forgotten

Oh our Father who art in heaven,
the soles of whose feet
are dirty with earth,

when an indigenous kid
is kidnapped and killed
and stretched out unburied far from home,
unmourned because of the native blood
that for fifteen rainy seasons danced her veins
in languages too satin, too delicate
for this money-punch crowd to comprehend,

she isn’t just another sparrow to You,
some native statistic out in the bush
who will never make the local news.

No, You stitched this girl together
from the crest where sunlight sparks on river,
from the birdsong that mixes with monkey chatter
and the stories that drift over open fires.

Now You sit vigil at her side,
cup her hair in Your hands and make lament.
You sing it the way her papa should have
and press Your scars, somehow still fresh,
against the wounds
that the world left open.
One day You will rise up
and avenge her death,
string her name like an arrow
in the bow of Your justice,
grown taut with patience—

but this evening You simply sit at her side
and cover her corpse
with the shadow of Your wings.
You will rise up, yes,
but there is an order of things,

and first You must show us
how to let ourselves feel it,
let ourselves weep,
how to love the least of these so much
we climb on their crosses with them
and bleed.

Poetry

Dare to Share

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

One day your good news
stopped having anything to do
with Jesus
and became a revolutionary organic cream,
a real Messiah of a product line

that you simply had to sell,
had to tell everyone you knew about,
again and again
even when they’re not asking,
shamelessly witnessing.

You will fill your conversations
with this nutrient-packed pill,
saturate your social circles
with oils called “necessary.”
You will blast it on the internet
and leave little pamphlets
like cheesy tracts
behind you in a trail
that leads straight to your bank account.

This is good news,
indeed.

Sometimes, when faith comes up
with an atheist,
you dodge your way out of the topic—
you don’t want to come across
as a pushy believer,
don’t want to risk relationships here.
You get back to your product.

Hey, something’s got to change your life,
revitalize your doldrum days
and the dry tips of your hair.
It might as well be
goat-milk coconut serum.
You might as well put your hope
and your courage there.

Poetry

Escape Artist in Training

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

You have to lock the strongest hearts
behind bars sometimes.
Though it isn’t fair—
though it may not be right—

The darkness needs to keep them there,
not because it’s mean,
but because it’s scared
of the buried power and the love-tipped prayers,
the glaring light that might leak wide
on the bleak-eyed shadows
if it let them loose.

But the goodness, too, and the champions
and the angel armies all agree
that it’s best not to break in
and set them free,
not because they’re uncaring,
but because they know
that strong hearts need iron
to help them grow.

They can take the metal,
though it bruises their souls—
they can make it out,
though not alone.
Their fingers, too thin,
will toughen to pry
the ceiling open into sky.

Strong hearts sometimes cry—
but they still come out stronger,
and when pain multiplies,
they just hold out longer.

Sometimes justice turns its head
as they lock an innocent heart away
because mercy remembers
the powerless prisoners,
the weak and the wobbly,
sick and unsteady
who’ve forgotten to fight
every guard that’s in sight,
who need a strong heart’s hand to hold,
need to hear a strong song
blast notes of hope
through the underground empty
and the frozen below.

Great men need prison
and all its compassion,
for strong hearts recall,
and they always come back
to rescue the next heart trapped
in that same old cage,
saying, “I know the way out.
And I will keep you safe.”

Heroes aren’t born;
they grow from the ground.
They’re buried in holes,
and they break their way out.

Poetry

Past Pride

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Past Pride

Poetry

Out of Control

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

Be careful, little heart, what you learn,

because once you know
that your soul is your own,
you can never forget—

and they will hate you for that.

Poetry

Lonesome Designer Home

Sarah GoochLeave a comment

My little sister didn’t get the point
of a dollhouse no one played with,
the dream home that kept me alone in my room:
crisp corners and tiny doors,
Victorian blue and beautiful,
three short stories high
and mine all mine to design.

My little sister longed for the days when we played house
in the cold concrete basement of cousin Jackie,
who interrupted the action because
who kept interrupting the
who stopped the game again to say,
“Now pretend like you say—”

My little sister missed the primordial days of her toddlerhood
when we played with her small plastic house
in our shared room, when she wouldn’t play the way
I told her to—and I was older.
Like a bitter housewife, I thirsted for control,
so instinct taught me to lunge for the throat
and to squeeze, to clamp, to strangle
with all the self-centeredness I would one day repress
into dainty miniature curtains she wasn’t allowed to touch.