Iris Lennox

Tag: Peace

  • Languidity

    This red shelf
    was a frame

    and now it's a stage
    upon which I stand
    alongside the kind of beauty
    usually reserved for dreams.

    To gaze upon
    is different than
    to stand upon
    so I suddenly feel the
    weight of my own
    inadequacy to speak.

    Vibrant beauty steals the voice.

    Perhaps that's why
    our mouths naturally open
    in the midst of awe.

    The desert speaks for me.

    "Sit down, city girl.
    I'll take it from here."

    And so I do.

    Daypack on dirt.
    Dust on denim.
    Knees bent below me
    like a student
    poised to receive.

    The lesson will be shown.

    First
    by what bends.

    Just north of the wash
    where blue grama,
    needle grass,
    and rabbitbrush
    catch the last light
    before the canyon
    yawns and stretches 
    into the stars,

    thousands of stems
    lean west

    all at once.

    Then east.

    Then halfway back,
    seed heads suspended
    between pull
    and release.

    A gust slips down
    through juniper,
    over shale,
    between ocotillo thorns,

    and the grasses

    begin again.

    Is it a dance? 
    A conversation? 

    Slow.

    Loose-hipped.

    Unashamed.

    They dance
    with the sky
    like old lovers
    who no longer
    need music.

    Only then
    do I notice

    who has been
    watching
    all along.
    I'm not the only audience
    here.

    I'm no audience at all. 

    Nothing here is done
    for me. I'm more like a
    stow-away. But—

    Sandstone
    watches
    keeping its spine.

    Basalt
    keeps its counsel.

    A saguaro
    holds both arms
    where it left them
    the year I was born,
    suspending the final 
    clap.

    From a distance
    it looks
    like contrast.

    Up close,

    it looks
    more like trust.

    One body
    bending.

    One body
    witnessing.

    One learning
    through motion.

    One learning
    through stillness.

    And the wind,
    passing through them all,

    enjoying the secrets
    each one keeps—
    the loyal wind knows
    and withholds the details.

    So I sit here,
    dusty
    studying the grasses' sway

    while cactus,
    juniper,
    and cliff face

    watch.

    Where does this movement
    exist 
    outside this valley?

    Where
    else does yielding
    carry this much strength?

    In kelp forests
    thirty feet below
    where sunlight cascades
    and breaks?

    In the chest
    of a sleeping child
    who trusts her blanket
    to stand guard?

    In the cottonwood,
    the heron,
    the mare,
    the marriage,
    the woman

    who has learned
    to stop fighting
    every fall,
    to stop tightening
    at every pull,
    to stop mistaking
    the giving of weight
    for the losing of self.

    Perhaps languidity
    has been here all along.

    In muscle.

    In memory.

    In old roots
    and older love.

    In anything
    that has learned

    when to lean.

    —Iris Lennox

  • Hope

    Without reservoirs, pumps, or measured release—
    water roils beneath the surface,
    through stone, around roots,
    navigating the dark.

    In the slow movement along its path,
    through soil, around what resists it,
    a force gathers
    until the ground gives way.

    And then a spring, then a river—
    arriving as it was set in motion,
    current and lucidity together,
    depth and brightness inseparable.

    On the surface
    light scattering,
    quick movements, flickers—

    what we call joy.

    Below—
    weight and direction,
    a current that does not scatter
    or turn back—

    what we call peace.

    The river carries both at once,
    dividing nothing,
    choosing neither.

    And we, without instruments to measure belief,
    stand at the bank,
    calling that faith—
    to stay.

    When it reaches us,
    not as droplets,
    but as a rising beyond its edges,
    we find ourselves entered
    rather than filled.

    So what can be said of hope
    by those who wait for the river to be visible
    before they believe it is moving?

    In believing,
    in the quiet continuance of it,
    God gives:

    joy at the surface,
    quick, ungraspable,
    arriving in flashes,

    and peace—
    lower in the water,
    where nothing hurries,
    where the current keeps its direction
    without being seen.

    And hope—
    as the river
    when it exceeds its banks,

    moving through fields
    that were never called river,
    carrying its course
    beyond where we stood.

    —Iris Lennox

    Romans 15:13

  • Builders and Destroyers

    Spazuk, a brilliant artist who paints with fire.
    There are builders and
    those who tear down.

    The builders understand the angles—
    how weight settles into a beam,
    how a line must lean
    before it can stand.

    They take the time to
    dream,
    to envision,
    to let something unfinished
    sit beside them
    like a quiet companion.

    In the late hours,
    when the world settles into dew
    and the last light leaves the window,
    they see it—
    not yet formed,
    but certain enough
    to return to.

    They move toward it slowly.

    Hands learning the material—
    the first press too hard,
    the surface pushing back,
    then giving slightly under the thumb.

    There is a patience to it—
    a willingness to begin again
    without pretending
    that nothing failed
    along the way.

    And when it sits
    just right in the place
    where positive and negative space
    hold one another—
    where the weight rests
    without shifting,

    when something rises
    that did not exist before,

    they step back
    grateful
    to recognize it—

    not as completion,
    but as process and maybe
    cohesion.

    Something new to sit beside.
    Something to enter.

    Those who tear down
    move in starts.

    They do not linger
    in spaces where people
    or places
    or ideas
    are becoming.

    They look for structures already standing
    and rest their heads against
    pillars—cracked, flaking at the edges—
    trusting what still holds
    to hold for them.

    Their attention sharpens there—
    at the point where structure meets strain,
    where something held together
    might give way—
    a thumb pressed once
    at the weakened place.

    They have no questions— 
    not how it was made, 
    not why.

    They do not stay long enough
    to understand
    what it required to stand at all.

    Instead, they borrow from what surrounds them—
    picking up a word already spoken,
    wearing it as if their name were stitched inside,

    and hold it
    just long enough
    for the next voice
    to take its place.

    They wait
    for the world
    to hand them a reflection
    they can accept
    without question.

    And while they wait,

    they pull—

    at the edge,
    where the fabric thins,
    at the seam
    where threads begin to separate,

    at the place
    where something is most alive
    and therefore
    most vulnerable.

    It does not take long.

    What took time
    to imagine,
    to hold,
    to bring into form—

    can be undone
    in a moment—
    a shift,
    a break in tension—
    and it gives.

    —Iris Lennox