Wild Horse

Bound for a time,
Lightly.
My choice to fight my halter,
To kick against the pricks.
To break my pasterns against the stall.
Tangle myself in the lead lines
Of those who would guide me.
To chafe and bleed,
Wild to break myself.
Deliver myself to the nacker
With my desperate unruly ways.
Or shall I submit myself to Thee?
Shall I take Thy bridle,
Learn Thy gaits,
Bear Thy burdens?
Shall I humble myself to serve Thee?
What then?
Learn of Thy gentleness,
Let Thee take the stones that bruise my feet,
Brush away the dirt that galls my skin.
Be guided by Thy gentle touch upon the reins
From dangers I cannot see and do not understand.
Ever watched by Thy tender care.

Soulmates

I loved you and only you before I ever knew you.
There was a place in my heart the precise shape of you,
Just waiting for you and only you to come along fill it.
To fill up the holes in me, and let me fill yours
And the ones we can't fill, we'll give to God.
I dreamed of you and only you, knew your soul with mine,
I just didn't see you at first because I forgot
That your beautiful, shining, noble soul that I knew and loved
Would be clothed in an ordinary human body.
It seemed strange to me that something so wonderful
Could look like everyone else.
I suppose that place in my heart could have accommodated someone else,
It's an awfully big place and someone smaller could have gone there,
But then the gaps would still have been there,
Where the edges of ourselves wouldn't have met so perfectly,
The way they do when I'm with you.
They say there's no such thing as soul mates,
And maybe that's true,
Maybe there's other people out there that could have fit there,
but you chose me, and I've chosen you,
And that means before and ever after, I love you and only you.

The Fanny Farmer banana bread recipe, revised

First, I set the stage. I turn the oven on to 350, wondering why most everything turns out okay at 350. Then with a little butter, I grease the breadpan, wondering why everything tastes okay with butter.
I take my three bananas,
Soft and yellow with brown-flecked skins,
And release them from their bindings into the silver steel bowl.
I smash them methodically with the back of a fork,
six four-tined marks on each banana,
Then slowly mushed and mixed into lumpy-smooth golden yellow paste.
I take two white eggs, smooth and perfect,
And with a satisfying THWACK crack them
So that I can pour the clear white and good-morning-sunshine yolk
Out of their porcelain casing into the bowl,
Where they are blended with the banana.
3/4ths of a cup of crystalline sugar,
Sparkling, scintillating, sweet natural glitter.
It pours from the cup like the sands of time,
Measuring out life as we know it.
My Mother measured sugar, my daughters will measure sugar,
My Great-Grandma borrowed a cup of sugar from the neighbors and met my Great-Grandpa.
2 cups of flour, Soft and gentle. It flows over my fingers like silk, into the bowl. White flour is so elegant and refined, so adaptable to every occasion. Like Stepan Arkedyvitch Oblonsky in Anna Karenina.
1 teaspoon of salt. Salt is sharp, biting, on the tongue, on your cuts, rubbed between your fingers, but salt just makes things taste good. It's lively and warm and awake. It is the cure for insipidity, so often a trait of the aforementioned flour.
1 teaspoon of the magic powder, fine white Sodium Bicarbonate, so that the bread can rise.
I don't have a cup of walnuts or chocolate chips to stir in, but that's okay. It's quite nice without.
I mix it all together, it's lumpy, but it's supposed to be. I pour it into the pan, scraping with a rubber spatula, not wanting to waste any of the stiff, sticky batter. As it bakes it makes the house smell warm and sweet and happy, like a home should smell. And when it's done, we all gather around, eating slices of tender banana bread with it's crunchy crust, spread with soft, melting butter.

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: A Girl's camp memory

There's a girl in the upper bunk
She's a chipper, cheeky chipmunk
Every morning when she wakes up with the sun.
Her bright, musical good morning
Gives us all quite ample warning
That soon our pleasant slumbers shall be done.