Long Before

Long Before

(“The people continued to sacrifice at the illegal places of worship, but they sacrificed only to the Lord their God.” 2 Chronicles 33:17)

We celebrated where the guns thundered and the
flags waved in the fiery sky.
We celebrated when the muskets when silent
but built monuments to remember our might.
We wear our uniforms to church,
we build chapels with crosses shaped like
fighter jets.
We sing god-and-country and cannot understand
why god has not declared a
winner yet.

We always had the better gunpowder,
never relied on spears or arrows,
wrote our language down for centuries;
poetry and science, medicine and odes for
the sorrows others inflicted upon us.
We were destined for these amber waves of grain.

Yet upon purple mountains there are still caches of blood,
there are cloaks of misery trodding the fruited plain.
How many times must the sun go down
before we reject religion that sees no difference between
animals and kin?

And still our monuments stand. Still our hollow statues of
hammered copper green with the age. We honor the killers,
sing of the rebels, send our missiles with prayers attached
to their tails.

But we have braided the stars and stripes so tightly with
the stripes and wounds upon our savior’s back that we salute the
flag and expect Jesus to answer early and late. 

Come to a monument without a statue,
settle in around the table of peace.
Break the bread where the only allegiance is
God toward his people. Find Jesus on the streets,
and bring our hidden guest, that we may begin again,
find rest again, proclaim glory again that shines the moment

we descend the mountain to the spot on the foothills where
feet walked, mothers gave birth, fathers hunted, long before
we touched the earth.