David Michael Lippman

I wrote this poem after a 48 hour retreat that was very significant for me. Sometimes those retreats can bring up feelings of lostness and loneliness. This poem particularly exemplifies the desire to have the love of God close enough to touch, taste. Life can feel like a wandering path, and so can our thoughts, my prayer is to see God in the journey and this poem reflect that longing. look water ways in aren’t ways out come by me and see the falls maybe they’ll spill for you when i’m so cool i want to cry dangling legs over ol’ by and by talking smart and tricks with kids oh i am such a stick in the mud ‘till all the babes come home and children’s children roam about i’m no longer alone in this shelter looking about for desperate faces who i’ve found to be more like me than anyone else who’s ever listened well that’s a fine way to define the line of who is in and who is out the whole trails dry as dirt now scents are scattered and the wind has blown so grass, leaves and st

  The image in this poem comes from the common experience of a car driving past a wreck on the freeway. It plays on the inability, in the midst of busyness, to stop and see the pain in another lives. Instead, we often need to trivialize or minimize pain in order to carry on at the pace we want to live. It pains me to think how much of our hearts we neglect because of someone's rule to produce, accomplish and survive. Isn't life a bit more significant that this? Response to Footfall  by Julie Maclean words squeak out                         a tight throat fingering someone else’s phone             describing scenes                         shaped like pen in hand turning over                         words in order to twist until                         we make some sense common things slip away             into the nothingness we all long for                         but a bit too afraid to glimpse it             in the car scratches             and angry faces