Book 40 The Sparrow Wars (2025, Edge Unlimited Publishing; ISBN: 9798298279604; ISBN: 9798277686737; ASIN: B0G5LK3CG9) Buy PDF of book: This book, The Sparrow Wars, and all of its content are the copyright © of Allison Grayhurst 2025 (Front cover photo © by Allison Grayhurst. All sculptures and photos inside the book © by Allison Grayhurst)

Open         Soak the born in their own initial conception to remember the pure-memory-pockets, the truth of miracles.         Underline everything that matters and read it again until no small word is skimmed over or taken for granted.         Open the shelter doors and let all animals in, wild ones, broken ones, aggressive and tame. Free with a blessing every dream that isn’t false,

Touch The first touch was bitter, tantamount to an attack, deception from a vantage point of spiritual superiority. The second touch was touching a tomb, still full of stench though the flesh had rotted long ago - just dry bones, barely a full form. The third touch angered, like when a snake snatches a fledgling, angry at the innate brutality all around.

Walk Then the bitter defeat was burning like a sin committed, recognized and unforgiveable. Then on a hill, heavy with weighted down legs and an injury there, debilitating but unexplained, the challenge came to walk. Walk slowly at first, walk like I can walk even though the reins are dropped and I have lost my mother, lost life’s victory over death and the comfort…

Small Moon A small moon melted fleshed out a sure-footed sacrifice but changed directions, too quickly into the direction of a red star. Then her heart was burned, crispy and crumbling, no more a perfect circle, drooping on one side, gravity became queen of her false crescendo song. Hiding her deformity in the dark red burn, hoping no one could see her misshapened side,

Talk If I talk again, I will keep my end-mind twisted so it cannot speak or formulate a plan. I have no constitution for plans or wherewithal for achieving human-made provisions. If I talk again, silence me into prayer, conversing only with the angelic order, strengthened by devotion and the power of obedience. If I try to be a player,

A Love Like No Other     Your steady love has saved me, one more dark wave rising and you hold my hand, staying the course, sharing with me your glowing inspiration, giving me space to expose my gruesome wounds within. You do not flinch, or distract, but give me room to writhe and cry out and then you look at me,

Over     Under siege like an anthill invaded upon by an anteater. Summer is tainted with humidity and boredom, intermingled with strong bouts of unholy despair.   I hear nothing when my hands are outstretched. I receive nothing in the hollow of the rock I am crushed inside of and asked there, inside of it, to be reborn.   Had I yearning once? Hope?

Surrendered     In the middle - steady, harsh waves, salty flavoured ocean, stranded, treading. Love comes smiling. It is a ghost. Joy comes and passes by. Purpose comes but floats by like a jellyfish riding the momentum.   In the middle, tired of treading, no escape, just the ebb and flow, surging, retreating waters. What lies beneath makes no difference because nothing is above…

She     Fear is splendid in making the body inflamed, bloated on trepidation at the news of many meadows burning.   She hurried and found a healer inside herself, willing to go the distance and forfeit personal power for a greater acquisition. She understood the traveller and the sit-at-homer as one in the same, especially on a stormy day or a year of upheaval.

You were born   with the light of a nebula inside of you, natural as your loving smile tortured now by isolation and a waning strength that has your commitment maimed and muted. But underneath that light still surges, cannot be snuffed out or ignored.   You are blessed with invincible charm that takes up a room and soothes every broken soul.

Ghost   Gone, dripping down the drain after a cut. Gone, the sweet flavour lingering of maple syrup on the tongue. Gone like democracy from a land conquered by a tyrant. Gone like inspiration from the crushing overtones, undertones, all-tones of relentless grief. Gone like a love that was once unique as it was necessary, stretching her grace over my home, my family and my faith.

Molasses-dream   The fighting blood, and the power of broken bones mending. Flip the unknowing cause of famine and feed on faith like a summer’s feast of fruits and nuts accepted as a birthright. Change is incremental, even the change of death takes time to incorporate into the nervous system, slowly inching into reality, sometimes healing in its wake, always scarring.

Slowly the builder builds   but the miracle-maker is quick - enormous change, dreamt-of-no-longer. The end-result is a shock of grace and the depths of God’s power displayed, gifted for no deserving reason but love and the faith that the receiver has in that love, welcoming that love.   Mustard seed blooming in seconds, why look under the blankets or walk the steady path?

Star     I think if I was a trillion-year-old star blazing, always in deep transformation, pulling planets into my orbit and asteroids and the tips of angel-wings, bypassing, touching, fearless, as bright or brighter manoeuvring with unexpected harmony   then remembering would be easy - to see the past as a sealed perfection, no matter how apparently flawed, to see myself as the same…

Out     I asked to be let out from that unwanted accomplishment. I asked to shed my shame, my duty and the hard-core call of doing time.   It was taken down and away from me, along with so much more. Guilt, and worldly bondage also fell along with security, along with a strange, twisted pride.   Knuckles down, hands still folded. In my head are ghosts of patterns dissolved…

Much Much and Many   I see what my eyes betray, but see the rising healing corridor shine and expand to set right the direction of the wind and the lack that keeps leaking until more lack insults all hope.   I see this home delivered, angels laughing in each corner and the floors and ceilings are rivers of abundance, crossing the barrier, dissolving barriers,

Milky Way Rare soot lengthening into the vacuum stream between stars. Even more rarified, it lulls in ghostly formations merging on the horizon, thicker where they combine, overlapping bubbles, hotter through the closed door. Nested motions with no net-motion overall, a scribble undulating, still frozen in this position of constricted movement. Blue shifts, red shifts, equal, loosely wrapped transient by compression…

Hubris     Steady as logic dictates the truth of superstitious rotation and effect, unmasks the mystic trappings of a fated existence ritual locked into the spinning orbs lightyears away, locked like us to the gravity of the sun, but no more, and if it is more, the intricate complexities of small stirrings would never be understood or solid enough to set the tone for the day or for a season.

Lift II     If I stay under ice in a house as vast as the sea, cut off from the sun, I will bloat up on anxiety’s quickening, gaining nothing but a heaviness uncurable and inevitable as iron-core gravity, heating.   So I will lift myself up onto the sides of the cracked ridges, gaze at the clouds overhead and write my new name in the air.

This Place             From a place of trust I glimpse your magnificence, your harnessed race of complexities in harmony, slow moving, more powerful than a hundred suns conjoining.         From a place of faith, being wrong is just as exciting as being right - a longing to know you, knowing I will never know you only know the minute aspects that flip…

Head bowed     The numbing curse of resentment comes to capture me in its lumpy maggot-riddled corpse, putting on my back a burden I am aware of I cannot keep. And even though I wash and scrub, daily cleansing myself of its putrid stench, it returns, living, climbing my shoulders into my hair. I know the only clear path is forgiveness,

Sparrow Wars I Sludge water dripping into an already clogged pipe. Blood in my microscope, torn out like a diary page, necessary to analyze the ingredients. Will the wound lift? be inverted into a creative windstorm or a nemesis spread, spidery-vein spreading until the curse is complete and conquers? I know love is alive, and that hot and sudden is the joy that stems from a miraculous shift.

…. Principles of duty overtaking sleep like a wave. Heavy love rooted in isolation, reflecting the depths of true giving. A condition turns to disease, restrictions bare down. What is ordinary becomes like a cage. Children in the drifting storm, drifting on condensed-traffic streets, how I love you. How I would do everything I cannot do to ease the grip of your elephant shackles.

…. Gaze, focus, hold. Unconscious stream of raw fluidity streaming, rising over barriers, drowning them with the pressure of an open door. Cracks of circumstantial disease, creating pockmarks to expand destiny choices,  fashioning gifts to give, earned by bomb-droppings and low flying plane-explosions. Cobweb parties, graffiti on the skin of your back, made with a blade as small and smooth…