The Lights of Baltimore

My family comes from South Philadelphia. And though we moved to the country in the tiny town of Gap, my brother still makes us cheer fiercely for all Philly teams. I grew up visiting my uncle and aunt there. My grandma would give us 95 cents to go round to the Rita's on the corner and get a small water ice and soft pretzel years before Rita's made it to Lancaster County. We played wiffle ball in the streets, and everybody scattered when the cars came. When I was in the play South Pacific at my high school, I remember quoting one of the lines to my mother which said, "What? Philadelia girl no saxy?" And my mother grinned wide and returned, "Oh, Philadelia girl SAXY!" Even from the country I knew, Philadelphia was our city.

But, I was driving some friends to the Baltimore airport a couple weeks ago, and was overcome with a pleasant feeling. You see when I was in high school I went there on a mission trip to work with inner city kids. Eventually we went back there again a few years later, and the love of the ministry there caused our youth group to begin a consistent ministry relationship with the Charm City Church. Looking out the windows I recounted our history there, because Baltimore was the place where God awakened my spirit to a knowledge of him. He used the people of the city to rip open my heart, and then he tinkered in the open wound until the vessel began to pump. Baltimore was the place where I learned that I was not the center of the universe. Baltimore was the place where my definition of what a great man was changed from monetary success to one willing to offer work to the homeless, and pay them in shoes because it was all he had to give. Baltimore was the place where I realized that ministering to children did not mean sharing the Gospel in fairytale form, because these children had seen too much to believe in fairy tales. Baltimore is where I heard "This Little Light of Mine" sung not as a cheerful kids song, but as a soulful declaration. Baltimore is where I knew that I had to stop wasting my life.

Perhaps there was some foreshadowing of my love affair with this place when I was just a child riding in the back seat of our conversion van on our way to South Carolina every year. Mom and Dad would wake us up in the middle of the night to begin the long drive down so that we would have the most time we could soaking up the sun and digging our toes in the sand. And though I was young, and tired, I remember fighting my eyelids for the first hour and a half of the drive because I knew that we would pass Baltimore along the way, and I did not want to miss the city at night, shimmering like a beacon and ushering in our annual time of rest. It's not hard to understand why they call it Charm City.

And so, even though I will continue to root for the Eagles win or lose (lose most of the time), it is driving through the labyrinth of round overpasses into Maryland's great city that festers a feeling of wonder in my belly. I feel alive when I see those lights. So, I wrote a poem about it.

You shine like a light bright
Under bed sheet tents.
Your stars, they twinkle
In your Lego skyscrapers.
You were born out of the
Dreams of Children building
Something they could look up to.

You look like jazz
The way you tickle the night sky
Like fingers on those ivories.
When I walk your streets
I wanna scat tunes and
Shimmy with pin striped suits
On Fosse legs under a flapped skirt.

You gleam like glow sticks
Neon streaking the rain kissed pavement
In a river of techno.
Electric blue washed in
Hot Sea foam green.
Your cars leave raves in their wake
And rainbows in their rear view. 

You dress like the symphony
How you fill the air with strings.
Your tympani thunders in my belly, and
Cymbals crash in my chest
There are flutes in the
Throats of your people.
They sing urban arias.

You burn like the floating lanterns
Painted pink with cherry blossoms
Slowly lifting in flitting ascent
There is something ancient in
Your metropolitan ways.
Your eyes are wise, but
Your heart is young and radiant. 

Hummingbird

As I stand before the screen door,
Coffee in hand, you send forth your hum
Let me know you are coming. And I search
But you are quick little one.
Your strong wings pumping too fast for my dark unhurried eyes.
Yet you do not wish to evade me.

In this dream the malice of man and beast cannot touch us,
It is as if Adam never broke our bond
His disobedient tongue tastes no sweet fruit in this place.
You do not fear my defiant nature, which lead you into a cursed land.
Instead you come boldly, beak to nose
And bid me open this door and remove that which separates us.
You speak to me with black eyes and soft vibrant tones

“May I come in, be with you? Exist with you? Rest with you?
May I lay soft in your un-callused palm melting into its lifeline
As fresh whipped cream into a mug of cocoa,
Making it richer with thick buttery goodness?
But first may I slow my wing so that you may see me? Not simply my
Magenta breast contrasted from the cool aquatic green, but watch me fly so slow
That the hum of my flight is stilled and silent for this sacred moment.
May incense burn and fill our nostrils so that no sense goes unquenched
For we will be swaddled in the fullness of this
A moment of congruence.
For we are no longer separate species
But one genus, a creation in accord
Stopping to experience what we were meant to be.”

What can my response be? I need not communicate in words with you
My pet and friend. How then can one correspond with the hummingbird
But to match the pitch of her wing and sing together
Joining our voices in hymns composed before music was,
The vibration of her waves touching my skin and raising its bumps as a chill after a warm bath?
Was there ever such oneness? It is as if I know what it is to be God!
We two persons, of one essence inside one another
Spirits dissolving into one another.

Is this what marriage is? For you are sun, burning the shadow of my darkened soul.
You are boys with sticks in a forest, saving the world from their own imaginations.
You are a mansion with many rooms, each with a name waiting to be introduced.
You are espresso, filling my blood with the electric that makes my veins blue.
You are a lemon, puckering my lip cleansing my mouth with its acid.
May I drink the nectar of your mouth like a tall glass of sweet tea from the south?
You may drink life from the place nearest to my heart and my fingers will hold you as a mother’s arms
Nurture her child. For it is as if you came out of me.
Enter back in, that I may carry you with me
Even in my waking. Stay hummingbird.

I will leave you the hairs from my brush and the twigs from our fallen birch tree
That you may weave together a nest in my liver.
I will find you a male and swallow him whole
So that you two may reproduce and raise your family in the deepest parts of my belly.
I will fast for a week, so that the hollow arches of my stomach
Will be a cathedral for your wedding.
Fill the church with orchids,
But your bouquet, build that from lilies so that when I catch it
I will remember that my husband has promised me a ring on the day of His rising.

He is the handsome one with the strong chin
Who breathed out your feathers.
I will sit with my back against his chest, his roots stretching beneath me
And his budding cherry blossomed branches above me. I will carry you there,
So that his tree grows round us,
For birds live in trees, and I want you to be at home in me, and we in him.

Can I never wake from this utopia?
Ah but I must, so that tonight I might meet an elephant on the patio
Who drinks lakes, and showers us with his trunk, and lets us sleep
Warm under his ears for blankets.
But do not worry mother, sister, daughter, friend,
I promise to take you with me as our Cherry tree walks with us the long road back to our garden home.

Breathe Easy

Breathe Easy

By: Elisa Parmer

Today is one of those days
When all I want is to be near you.
To bury my face in your chest
And rest
With your arms swaddling me tight.
Because this is the only place I can smother my face
And still breathe easy.

It's funny how people who hate physical affection
Still long for your touch.
They go searching the world trying to find out your name.
It's a shame
That more people don't know this feeling of
Safety.
So when catastrophe hits
Like a ton of bricks
Falling over thousands of lost souls,

I run to you,
Praying that you will open up your arms
Hold me in your hands.
I feel sorry for children afraid of
The embrace of a man
Because we misrepresent you.

But I guess this thing we call language
Isn't strong enough to bear your image.
So you placed it
In a face,
In a body,
In the essence of man.
But the picture is so heavy
I keep dropping it.

You don't see that though
With your crimson glasses
You see me as righteous.
You see a complete mirror image
Even though I'm still trying to pick up the shards from the pavement.
Yet you are anything but blind
And in time
I might begin to understand why you breathed
The dust of my heart into a masterpiece.