Those With Time

Those With Time

(“The Lord will do what he thinks is right.” 2 Samuel 10:12b)

We erect the fences, dividing lines, cutting the earth like a giant pie.
But we do not carve pieces to share, but to make each neighbor fully aware
what is not theirs. We would split a tree right down the middle
to include just a jot, just a little more land to call our own.

We build barriers, at least seven feet or more, to keep me from seeing
they eyes across the board. We know all too well that if we gazed in silence,
without words breaking the sky, without fashion clues or hairstyle whys,
and stopped.

So time took one slow beat at a time,
one tick, the next, one more, and then four,
five slow strikes of the chimes, six the next pulse,
round the straight face of time so slow
you lose count, you do not move, your eyes
head high, his eyes hear the same stroke and

Finally time is one long hallelujah chanted ahead and behind.

Fixed upon that moment, glued to the gaze of two sets of eyes
seeing,
first time, graceful, aligned without interruption by cross-examinations
and proper explanations.

Your fences have served their purposes and now, the only thing you know,
all you can smell plus all you have chosen well, is in this exchange of
pulses and particles and rays; you both have thrown away everything you
learned about the person behind the eyes.

And as time, which has not stood still, but like a river, has made you feel
one with its current and all it carries to the sea; the eyes give way to the same

Slow beat one at a time, one tick, the next, and all you know,
it is not clockwork that has measured so well, but two heartbeats that
surrounded by grace
beat in time; sans orientation, religion, status and sans race.

Grace is the upbeat that tore down the walls and left the world
whole and warm, for those with time to see.