by Emily Wierenga | May 6, 2011 | Uncategorized
it is hard to believe in good when children suffer. when little ones hurt, i have more questions than answers. but here, joann helps me, in a world of tear-stained cheeks, to trust that one day, everything will be okay, and that God does exist even when evil seems to...
by Emily Wierenga | May 4, 2011 | Uncategorized
Her name was Yvonne. Yvonne Patricia Anderson. She wore skirts and cardigans; he liked the way the material swished against her nylons as she walked carefully to her desk every morning. He’d sit glasses pinched to farm-boy face trying to study Calculus, unable...
by Emily Wierenga | May 3, 2011 | Uncategorized
can you hear him?in the quiethe beds himself in the bud, peeling greenin the call of the geese sewing v-necks across pale wool of skyin the frogs croaking symphony from the pond in the woods in the farmer’s hand fingering soft the seed, praying it into soil in...
by Emily Wierenga | May 2, 2011 | Uncategorized
“to love Jesus the best that i can.”they’re standing upfront, her boys, dressed in khakis and plaid. the one with the beard is going to Honduras to clean up drinking water and sing in spanish and speak sermons, the other, in plastic rims, to climb...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 29, 2011 | Uncategorized
i’ve got food on my back and mud on my feet and we’re walking our way into forest into cabin and it’s springand the robins are singing, you know the way they sing? like the world is a cathedral, and they, the only choir, and we’re walking lined...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 27, 2011 | Uncategorized
It’s just a shoe, a pink baby shoe, but it shatters me like glass on the road where I walk, and I can’t go on…can only cradle myself against a tree as I would have cradled my child, the one who bled red from me.There was nothing truer than that child’s...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 26, 2011 | Uncategorized
I’m all mud from falling slope. It’s soil like he was black, in shirt and pants and voice and paper in a church so still even the babies hushed. I remember Friday as we walk on Saturday. The grass and sky all there is, hills of scratchy green and boy in wagon and us...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 22, 2011 | Uncategorized
I’ve left the can open and he’s 16 months and he tips it, white on carpet on wall and there’s so much white I laugh.Soap and water and clean what son has spilled and it’s the one place I can breathe. This easel, this canvas, my church. This place between brush and...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 20, 2011 | Uncategorized
in high school, it was bon jovi and bryan adams and i’d lie on my bed, the scratch of cassette and their throats and the day and then i’d get up and i’d dance, the door stayed shut, mum not letting sisters in for the secular music i played and...
by Emily Wierenga | Apr 19, 2011 | Uncategorized
Egg shell shatters, a thousand pieces of white and son plays with blueberries. We’re making scones on a Saturday. He laughs as the purple fruit rolls; flour on his nose. Flour his father-in-law grows, wheat fallen, wheat dead and drug, stripped of stalk where once it...
