The Offering – Audio

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child's hands

I re-submit this to go along with my recent thoughts on Christmas, Grace, and how one might be led down a blind ally seeking God or truth in doing.

With up-lifted hands I hold my best.
I offer it to you.
With trembling I await your acceptance of my gift
With trembling I dread your rejection.

I am in need. I am broken and out of my brokenness
I have fashioned my offering.
I have pieced it together with much pain and trembling
hoping to please you.

Now it is all that I have.
Every good thing in me has been
made manifest and resides in my gift.
I await your judgment.

As you approach I am borne aloft in anticipation
of your response.
My hopes walk the razors edge between your
delight and your disappointment.

I am reeling! You walked past my gift as if
it were not there.
I was prostrate offering my sacred gift, that which
I had made for you.

I am punctured, humiliated before you.
I shrink, collapsing, naked and ashamed.
Ashes are all.
Ashes, decay, and dry barren dust.

You move into the wasteland of my soul.
Slowly and with great care you search.
Blowing away the ashes while your dirty hands
seek something in the wreck that I am.

My humiliation evaporates as I see that
you heed my filth less than you did my gift.
You find and hold a tiny ember still glowing
somehow beneath the rubble.

I rest like a child in your hands and
again offer my gift to you.
You smile, kiss my foolish head, and with
a magnet attach my gift to your refrigerator.

35 thoughts on “The Offering – Audio”

  1. This is still my favorite poem of all your work. It fills me with hope… Part of the reason, I suppose, I learned something new this autumn season. Thank you, Bard…

  7. I keep coming back into your sanctuary to read this poem. I picture it hanging over an altar and others kneeling there following your lead because you’ve shown them what Jesus is really all about. I take great, great comfort in this poem. It’s still my favorite one that you’ve written so far. When I’m feeling tender and tired, this is where I come for reassurance that even in embers, God finds the essence of who we are. You have been a lifeline for me in that way…

  8. It’s interesting hearing it, rather than having read it. I think of old coffee houses when poets would sit before a microphone, and read to faces unseen in the dimly lit room. There’s a sense of once was, in hearing a reading.

    But beyond that, your writing is exquisite. Thank you.

    • You are so kind. My grown kids laugh at me cause I cant sing so I just started talking. I can do that. When I write things I hear it as much as anything. Thank you for taking the time to listen and comment.

      • You’re very welcome! I wanted to stop by, because I remembered your poem, and that I commented. I just had to find my way back here. I get lost in the catacombs of blogs.

    • Can’t you just picture him in a long-sleeved, black and white-striped shirt with a black beenie on his head. That was, of course, before there was karaoke… He’s a regular Maynard G. Kebs (Bob Denver) of Word Press. Very unique and soulful. 🙂

  10. you know I really do like this piece. Great expression. Its weird to like something that sounds so beautiful but resonates with a melancholy glow. Nevertheless you have done a wonder here I did enjoy the read.

  11. It was interesting rereading this conversation knowing you a little better now. I feel like I was being kind of flip. I didn’t know how badly you were bleeding.

  13. I admire you for being able to hold onto the beauty in all the misery you see. Our daughter was a social worker in Maryland for the juvenile court system for a little while after she got her degree. She couldn’t handle it.

    So sir, I doff my hat to you. Anyone who can handle them Baptists can’t be all bad! grin

    • I think it broke something in me but then again perhaps I was always broken and trying to fix it outside of me in the lives of others. I have longed and wished for the beautiful and the right and how it ought to be always.

    • I am a Redneck headshrink (psychotherapist). But I wear bluejeans and go into peoples homes and their schools and even to court. I work in mostly rural Alabama with families. There is alot of abuse, physical, drug, sexual, etc. Crackheads, convicts, and Baptist are my specialties. 🙂 I am very good at it but it is very ugly stuff.

      • You are like my friend, “EarlyBird.” Same job. Hard on the body and the mind. I don’t think she specializes in Baptists though, she gets a lot of untrained parents, who were never trained as children, much less parents, at least, that’s my take on her job. She’s a good friend.

  15. I am laughing at myself from a silly shy place. Its fun to be old and doing that. I have real bloggers that actually liked something I wrote. I’m doing a happy dance. I’m not very serious about what I write but it is probably the most important thing that I am doing right now. It is the best expression of my soul that I know of. I deal with many ugly things in my profession. Thank y’all for playing. Thank you for recognizing something that I tried to make pretty. I think from now on I will consider the blogger like thingys to be the equivalent to making it to my momma’s refrigerator. And if you knew me you would understand that for me that is the highest honor.

  16. Calensariel

    I am broken and out of my brokenness
    I have fashioned my offering.

    That is so, so beautiful. The whole poem is wonderful.

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