To Give You Pause

To Give You Pause

(“As soon as Jehudi finished reading three or four columns, the king cut them off with a small knife and threw them into the fire. He kept doing this until the entire scroll was burned up.” Jeremiah 36:23)

Of all the scripts and quatrains,
plays and prophecy, epics on papyrus,
battles recorded in cuneiform,
or shopping lists on ostraca,
ever discovered in Palestinian caves,
Nag Hammadi or Alexandria;

Of all the word that is written,
from tongue to pen or stylus,
more has been stung by power
masquerading as benevolent
editors for the masses.

Read them while you can, young ears,
dig beneath the pages the poets fill sparsely,
breathe between the words, the

s
t
o
p

meant to give you pause.

Selah.

Form the words round like apples,
tell the tales passed down the annals
from aunts to nieces, the bits and pieces
filled by the color of age and rendition.

From the heroes who fight like gods above us,
to forests where honey runs for deer and cubs;
read the dusty one set down weeks and years,
peek in streaks through anthologies and catalogues
of high jumps and the most burps in a sitting;
and open the locked ones, the blocked ones,
the hidden you’ve only heard talked about in
hushed tones and forbidden.

Open the pages, let them open the sky,
open the vowels, the consonants, sentences,
and paragraphs; tables, columns and dialogue;
the styles adorning the naked truth,
the Word made Flesh by the first utterance:

“Good”.