Abbreviated Fog

Abbreviated Fog

(“If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored— so clean up your life.” Job 22:23)

If you don’t mind, would you take some time to
simply be silent
and sit in the pain,
and restrain yourself from trying to
put god in a place that explains what
you can never understand?

When someone has lost it all,
is it your calling to take some more?
Will you seize the fractures in his soul
and insist he walk upon the shards?
Is it so hard to live within the ellipses,
the dots and dashes,
the abbreviated fog of suffering
with another whose life has become
a broken paragraph, the torn pages of
a book nearly written.

The wind speaks better than the air that escapes
from wise men without knowledge. Spacious in their
capacity to blame and misname every flinch
of the afflicted, they see only effects that must have had
a cause.

Will you pick apart the psalms of despair,
throwing them upon the ash heap of your assumptions?
Will you hear the moans and reject the questions
because answers are easier to handle? But what if
the sand filled your castle; what if the fire melted your
everything you had crammed into your storage sheds?
What if the heads of everyone in town turned away because
they relished answers just like you?

Stay quiet my friend. Sit close enough that I hear your breathing.
The time for talking will come. But now, leave your dissertations
and start the tea kettle please.