It’s Sunday. I have a Soapbox. I step up to it, tap the mic, and stare out at a handful of people, mostly passerbyers who look over their shoulder at me as they’re walking by. They have places to be. Maybe church, maybe brunch because hey, it’s Sunday.
Yup, it’s Sunday and I have a soapbox and as it turns out, I have a sermon. What is today’s sermon, you ask?
Today’s Sermon
is the squirrel scampering outside my window, who runs to the outer limb of the camelia branch in search of new horizons.
Today’s sermon is wondering why I say I don’t like tattoos and yet anytime I place my hand on my cat’s warm, fuzzy belly, I risk permanent scarring from bite marks and scratches. Like that bloody knuckles game we used to play in junior high where we’d pinch, scratch, slap, and press our knuckles into one another’s flesh and still go back for another turn because we were so new to masochism, that the pain felt almost pleasurable.
Today’s sermon is wondering if the great human experiment will end in some kind of Jonestownian way, except we’ll be lying there will cell phones in our hands, wearing Dow Chemical sponsored N95 masks, cheap eclipse glasses, toe tags with our health data barcodes on them, and Apocalypse World Tour t-shirts that a merch vendor was hawking just outside the gate.
Today’s sermon is the Lego bouquet of twelve red roses my husband made for me and placed in a glass vase that I can’t even begin to tell you how much it delights me to no end and which has me thinking about a friend of a friend whose adult son had a dream of working for Lego as a design engineer and how he hounded them so much they finally flew him to Copenhagen for an interview and eventually hired him and that tickled my imagination with a feather, too.
Today’s sermon is about a longtime friend whose birthday was yesterday, and who I didn’t call but instead, thought of fleetingly with a fondness born of having worked together as part of the opening sales team for a historic railway hotel back in the wayback day, and how nice it was that I was able to catch up with her in my dreams last night without having to drive to Calgary, craft an email or text, or pick up a phone, and of course, when I woke up, I started to wonder why dreams haven’t evolved to a place where we can scroll through a theme menu like Netflix and choose the nocturnal experience we really want to dream about. Because if we could do that, I would totally skip the recurring dreams about airplane crashes or the one where I keep walking in circles and getting lost in some poorly designed house with a bunch of strangers and every room is like some choose your own adventure absurd reality show.
Today’s sermon is life circling back upon itself like a cross between Groundhog Day, The Matrix, and that shimmering moment of Déjà vu that gives you goosebumps, but AI claims is just the brain glitching, similar to how my sluggish desktop computer acts when I have too many browsers open.
Today’s sermon is a blend of an email string my son and daughter-in-law sent me from their condo HOA residents who are all up in arms because L&E are just now using their parking spot which makes it challenging for another resident to back in to her middle spot, mixed with the conversation I overheard at the mall yesterday about how ain’t none of us got time to get our panties in a knot about parking issues, and sprinkled with memories of how an ex-neighbor used to look out his window whenever the spot in front of his house came open so he could run outside and park his vehicle there because apparently, he had nothing but time and knotted panties and contempt and how maybe, just maybe, that’s a metaphor for these times.
Today’s sermon, speaking of neighbors, is my own twisted panty pettiness (a phrase that oughta be a new theatre warm-up game and tongue twister, especially if all the thespians had a pair of panties in hand to wring) on account of three of our cul de sac neighbors still having either their Christmas tree up, their holiday lights on, or their deflated holiday ornament hanging from their roof like a giant used condom, and in today’s sermon, it occurs to me that if we had an HOA, I’d be the gripey Karen complaining to the manager about how the neighborhood has gone to shit, and that, in turn, brings recollection of our former neighbors Bob and Sue (and their dog named Boo), who were like surrogate parents to us and moved to Arizona a decade ago but who always kept faux tapered candles lit in their windows to honor the memory of their two sons who died in the late aughts, and how discovering just this week that Bob died recently makes me want to put a lit candle in my own window, like say a Christmas candle in the spirit of being State Farm good-neighborly and small e ecumenical, even though I’m still grumpy AF about it all.
Today’s sermon is the same as yesterday’s sermon and the day before. To wake up and remember that even as there’s a wildebeest world out there on fire, there’s a wild world inside you, too, that needs preservation and trail maintenance, sacred site designation signs, sunshine, chocolate-flavored vitamins, a warm blanket, a soft seat, and an unyielding constitution.
My words above are a kind of ‘after poem,’ inspired by Cheryl Dumesnil who credits her poet teachers Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux for reminding her to “never let the bastards get you down” and for helping her develop “the ability to be both vulnerable enough to feel the impact of the world and strong enough to speak the truth about it.”
I first learned of this poem in Laurie Wagner’s 27 Days/Wild Writing e-class in the formative days of the pandemic, when we so desperately needed the soothing balm of poetry and powerful writing prompts to help us make sense of things.
As then, so now.
Blessed be, Amen, shalom, salaam, go in peace, and do as I say not as I do, which is my cautionary invitation to you to try to love your neighbors a tiny bit more than I have lately or you, too, will have to build a soapbox and find yourself unpacking the metaphor of what being a shitty neighbor has to do with the tangled mess we find ourselves in.
Today’s Sermon
by Cheryl Dumesnil
is slop buckets knocking
against each other
and a towel cart
squeaking down the hall
and grease stains
worked into cracked palms.Today’s sermon is
red-wing blackbirds
dive-bombing a raven
with yolk on its beak.
Today’s sermon is
spring leaves as tiny
soldiers receiving
soot with open hands.Today’s sermon is
a fifteen-dollar
garage sale bike
and now the kid
can ride to school
like everybody else.Today’s sermon is
dragging grace around
like a rust-eaten wagon
pretending it’s whole.from Rattle #67, Spring 2020 edition
Your sermon rang true and ran through me and my hope, that rust-eaten wagon.