Two old poems

Sometimes it's fun to look back at what I've written and realize that some of my big questions now have answers. In perusing an old journal, I found two poems: one wrestling with the idea of vocation, the other wrestling with my then-single state. I now feel that I know my vocation, and I am engaged... but I still enjoy reading the old poems. So, selfishly (as befits a blogger), I am going to post them here.

1. "Vocation"

Life would be easier without vocation.
Simpler.
Like slip-on pumps
for eye-hooks on patent leather
or velcro on your tennis shoes.
Life would be easier without that inward force,
Passion,
earnest knowledge that I am made for something--
For something.
Not anything.
A single key
jagged edges purposefully carved
does not open every door,
but some doors.
And maybe only one door.
Somewhere.
That key -- does it know?
the purpose of its edges,
significance of its grooves,
does it dream of that blissful moment of niche-dom --
ultimate fulfillment,
joy?

Yes, life would be easier without vocation.
I could watch old reruns
and eat bon-bons
and go to culinary school
and travel to Greece, and Paris, and South Africa,
and work so I could travel again.
I could try everything once--
a professional dabbler--
poetry, piano, chef, photography,
wife, mother, flirt, scholar,
missionary, pastor, cantor, priest,
Pour out this passion abundantly,
freely, lacking purpose--
A rainstorm and not a garden hose--
in every direction, like a storm
sweeping down over the Rim,
I could be free to fling passion
like buckets of paint at an immense canvas,
and energy at one pursuit at a time
or three or ten or twenty
or none if I didn't feel like it.

But

I am not my own.
Funny--
I seem to have the control of limb and tongue and mind
Divine illusion?
I am suited for something.
Not just anything,
I think.

2. "Paul's Gift"

Will my time come?
My time to squeal like a toddler
meeting her first wriggly puppy,
My time to look at a cloud, a bush, a rake,
and think of him
and know he thinks of me.
Time to live the oldest story of all
before the Fall,
for the trite to become the truest true.

Will I be sappy?
Saccharin?
Susceptible?
Will I know from the start? Will we part
reluctantly, lingering in dusk
as the heavens expand and we grow small?
Will I resonate with radio tunes,
relish chick-flicks without skepticism?
Will my inner clock tick louder
than my ambition?
Will it strangle my call?

That call -- clear as vodka,
triply intoxicating--
will he store it in a cabinet
for a rainy day,
or for his own amusement,
or to bring out at parties?
Will I suffocate in someone else's dream?
Or
is Paul's gift bewitchingly,
perplexingly,
my own?