by Mary Eileen Knoff
In January, for thirty years, I have left behind
grey Seattle skies to sit beside the Pacific shore
at Land’s End, on the Baja’s southern tip,
seeking respite from the northern chill.
grey Seattle skies to sit beside the Pacific shore
at Land’s End, on the Baja’s southern tip,
seeking respite from the northern chill.
Each year, thunderous surf lashes the land,
crashing against its standing stone, La Roca,
filling the sky with mist and foam.
This year the scene turns my thoughts toward home:
there an explosion of presidential orders
overwhelms like a deluge, threatening
to reshape truth as surf reshapes the sand.
Can our country withstand the onslaught thrust upon us?
Many of us now cast about for a course
to follow through these treacherous times.
Life at Land’s End calls out to me through the fog:
Stand firm like this rock, persist like the tide
shine like lighthouses for those who ride on stormy seas.
Your words and deeds of truth and mercy will be guides,
like bright, shining stars in a blackening sky,
like rafts of life on fear and greed’s wicked seas.
Mary Eileen Knoff spent the first two decades of her professional life as an English teacher, editor, and freelance writer. In the mid-1990s she studied for pastoral ministry and then served as a spiritual companion and small group facilitator since the early 2000s. She has lived in Redmond, Washington near the foothills of the Cascades for the last thirty years. For the last decade I have been crafting a collection of poems about life on the pond that I call Ponderings. I am in search for a publisher of that collection these days. In 2012, as part of a doctoral program in ministry, she collected, edited, and published writings by myself and others, now in a second edition, called Seasoning the Soul: Meditations for the Celtic Year.
