MEETING A PRAYING MANTIS
A Praying Mantis
clover to bright emerald green
landed on my sleeve
and lingered as I worked
in my hay field.
While I’m not much of
a praying person,
my concern for a friend
suffering from cancer
led me to ask the mantis
to consider praying for her.
The creature
visibly
pulled its legs
into praying
position
(which I realize
actually indicates
readiness for prey
although my sleeve
held nothing but this creature
and my bemused delight).
So I asked the mantis
on behalf of my less-believer self,
projecting my real hope for
my friend
beating off the cancer
preying on her.
The mantis visit ended
abruptly thereafter. The creature
springing back into the field’s stubble,
disappearing into the clover and grass.
In all my farming years,
never has a Praying Mantis
visited me in this manner.
While our theologies
may not have converged,
I felt grateful at
this strange alignment
of my request
and the mantis’
prayer-folding response.
GRIEF
Rhymes with relief
although there’s little to none
of it. Thief, too, rhymes
which at least denotes
what seems stolen: you, of course,
and me left a grey sagging squirrel tail
fleeing death’s dog breath.
What days crafted beyond this one:
more grief days joining my disunion
vision-skewing heat rising off asphalt
gumming shoe bottoms I no longer wear
in the house or to church.
As if I go to church anymore.
Days topping like a sneaker wave,
high surf crashing without warning,
washing me out to sea again.
Shore receding, a shoal of sharks,
teeth gnashing, their numbers growing.
I am alone now recalling those distances
we crossed together. Unused to these new
distances, their upending desolations.
Not even black stays solemn forever, they say,
crows’ feathers molt, if only partially, new grown
after a time. Periodically I will want the sea’s bottom,
or apex sharks leaving no sorrow-trace
in grief's lapping waters.
MY INSUFFICIENT PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
It shifts. Sometimes daily.
Mostly not. Who has time for deep,
absorbed thought anyway? Like scuba diving
there are risks of nitrogen narcosis, for one.
Given the deep bends of philosophical thought
I’m too busy living my surface life. Noshing
my own minor slice of life’s apple pie (mounded
with whipped cream). That’s generally my
ill-examined-to-heedless philosophy of life.
Yet sometimes I need an infusion of caloric thoughtfulness,
some kind of buoyancy control. Religious views mostly
rile more discomfort than comfort, failing to cede
firm meaning. Nevertheless, Jesus is my go-to
whenever I’m trying to embrace the believing thing.
He arises (excuse the pun) into my seeker-grasping
for some settled philosophy to call my own.
Not that seeker-grasping can’t be heedless, of course:
like Wile E. Coyote forever running off some cliff.
At the bottom a meaninglessness anvil crashing on my head!
But like hapless Coyote I keep trying to capture
meaning’s Roadrunner, ever a shifty pursuit.
I’m happiest when bolstered by my apple pie’s
slice of yum mundane. Really, nobody’s figured it out.
We all just pretend. Oozing countless anxieties
like a snake re-shedding its skin. Multiple times daily.
NATIVITY
Jesus Christ! some say
profanely, used
as an expression
of quite surprised
or actual astonishment,
or prayerfully even with something
expressing God’s nature.
Although neither
Jesus nor Christ
is really his name, the one
his donkey-exhausted mother
and very reluctant
but still worthy
step-dad to be, Joseph,
actually gave him. Later then
after all that desperate
nativity time of
water, blood, new-born wails,
umbilical cord and placenta, all
messily straw-dropped.
With those angel-gathered
shepherds and their
adoring sheep,
even a parked donkey
and a couple
of camels looking
on--at least in most
people’s Xmas crèche.
The camels huffing
their impatient breath
wisely waiting near
the hay-disturbed manger.
And they say, too, angels
singing while balanced
on bright star-stream
of heavenly light. With
their holy cacophony
loud enough to startle
awake the sleeping still
unnamed Yeshua into
his quite surprisingly
messy earth-birth. Oh,
and there was mirth too,
at all this delivered
joy to them,
to us.
Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including Raw Journal of Arts, Ekphrastic Review, and Modern Haiku, among others. Ed is writer-in-residence at George Fox University. He is also assistant fiction editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction. Ed has a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals—including a rooster named StarTrek. A collection of his poems, Near Truth Only, has been published by Fernwood Press, 2022.