First Time Heard

"First Time Heard"

(“Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. When they got there, he told them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’” Matthew 26:36)

Carried along into the cave where olives branched to make
a cavernous ceiling, the worst dirge was sung with only
a Single One understanding the words.

Though the words may swirl around our heads when the
dying heart asks our attention; though we cannot grasp
which rhyme was chosen or why, the aching unto death
demands companions who will stay though the song
as perplexed as sitting at a Seder for the first time.
You know it is holy, and cannot perceive what each
cup, each herb, each prayer means. But you stay with
all attention; like hearing Leonard Cohen without knowing
he is a genius.

With the final Psalm sung, they stopped midway into the
grotto where sadness sank beneath their feet like mud
under the crusted earth. They were invited this
musty night and knew not why, trying to match their
mouths to the words their Muse had mastered.

Sad, frightened, agony and pain-till-death; these were
not words they had heard from the Joy of Heaven before.
They were absurd, their hearts bubbled like boiling,
in love’s strange attachment tonight to the Lover
leading them to their darkest encounter. They could
not
pray
but
slept.
And so would I, at the way the darkness made
the refrain a migraine unfastened from verse.

He stepped just outside their sight,
but they heard every word of His pain blasting
through the canopy to Heaven’s remote outpost;
and sleep only echoed the words in dreams as real
as their waking.

Sadness encountered sleep; sadness twice and then
the weeping was done, the will respun to symphony’s best
while others slept the words they could not forget.