Fill This Vacancy

 

Fill This Vacancy

(“You have done well, and proven yourself to be my loyal and trustworthy servant.” Matthew 25:21)

Let me educate you about silence,
about the abyss that exists when the decades you
invested
amount to hardly a whisper a quarter mile up the road.

I hide myself, take no risks,
wince at squinted questions,
die of laughingstocks.

Let me fill you in if you do not know
that, beaten at my own game, I stayed in until the
final seconds ticked my fate dry. If you are asking:

Yes, I cry every day.

My time ran out, my well ran dry,
my risk was greater than my apparent reward.
My friends forgot to write, and one or two
called me in 24 months of shivering solitude.

And just down the hill today, just a 10-minute walk today,
they gathered six months after my return. Isolation
has insulated me
from unwrapping my skin again. I trace the same route
over and over,
up the road and down the valley where
bramble and tree limbs entangle the cold banks of
the brook that is background noise to the mosquito buzz
haunting the abyss in my head. I am an analog
AM radio
forever caught in the static between stations.

I hope Jesus, the one quoted above, will fill this vacancy soon
because I’ve been a tenant on this battle hill too long.
And if no one else has a word, a hug, a plaque or an
invitation to dine around campfire smoke,

I hope the words he spoke will be enough for me to hear,
that someone thinks I’ve proven myself,
that someone thinks my self-inflicted wounds are
worth the time to heal.