by Emily Wierenga | Jun 14, 2011 | Uncategorized
She got brain cancer, my mum, who once changed behind closet door when Dad was in the room, and she now needed Dad to dress her. She sang off-key while he tender clothed her, and this daughter who used to peek through the crack and cry over the way Mum hid, this...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 13, 2011 | Uncategorized
my womb is a ripening mango, pulsing life, and i am more mother than other now. the feet of one boy in my ribs, the other clutching tight my belly where he pokes my button and cries to be held, and husband plays footsy and touches this flushed skin of woman when all i...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
“farming brings us face to face with the fact that we are poor; that we have to work for the things we need, or do without them.” (catherine Doherty, ‘apostolic farming’)soil fills black my fingernails, and i touch God’s face when i’m...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 8, 2011 | Uncategorized
Soup, and it’s dripping down her chin and I wipe it as a mother would her baby—only I’m her baby, and where are her pills? Lined up neat by my father in a green tray, I find the ones for Lunch and she cannot swallow, and it’s one of those days. She’s staring at a...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 7, 2011 | Uncategorized
he’s a silent man who moved across the yard when he got married, who spends winters hunting for antlers and summers skipping rocks across the creek in his land. he is a farming man who talks tractor and crop, a meticulous man who pulls dandelions from lawn and...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 5, 2011 | Uncategorized
the ordinary becomes the container for the divine and safely holds what was uncontainable. the transcendent is disclosed in what is wonderfully familiar: bread, wine, fire, ash, earth, water, oil, tears, seeds, songs, feastings and fastings, pains and joys, bodies and...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 3, 2011 | Uncategorized
He’d peed across floor, refusing the snack I’d made him and I’d rushed him to the potty where we’d sat, him squirming on potty and then, up and running in flannel bathrobe with the dog-ears and his little legs while I stayed curled on the bathroom floor. Nights of no...
by Emily Wierenga | Jun 1, 2011 | Uncategorized
we water the flowers every evening, my gardener in his diaper and bare feet with his green watering can, and he holds it ever so careful, the spout, over pansy and peony and he begs for more once the soil’s drunk. but tonight is different. tonight he stands...
by Emily Wierenga | May 31, 2011 | Uncategorized
in a world that tells me i am worth what i weigh, how do i live the God-image? and how do i teach my daughters to sing with soul?i’m swelling with the life of another, growing round with pulse and kick and i’ve never felt more like a woman. womb-an. the...
by Emily Wierenga | May 30, 2011 | Uncategorized
They’re folded into purple and black satin, and the flowers white and the mountains make a jagged rim around the edge of a turquoise pool. I remember how Trent and his dad argued the definition of a mountain on our drive into Jasper and all I know is, they are beauty....
