Holy Amnesia

 

Holy Amnesia

(“I, I am the one who wipes away all your sins. I do this to please myself. I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25)

I do not want to boast about privileged visions
or untrained prophesies,
but I have sat upon park benches when the sun barely
reached the ground. Alone beneath the sky,
breath like ghost clouds,
my heart with so many holes it contained
the gravity of the universe.

I have seen

Birds approach; gray, rust and deep sea
toy soldiers eyeing the ground. Above
and alone
a woodpecker hunts the bark; castanets
to waken the mourning doves pairing up
for winter’s work. They have been here before.

Taken to the extreme, all I can imagine
(after the tears have dried following my last disaster)
is stillness that entices a robin, then two,
to come within inches of my mud-encrusted shoes.

Do I deserve their friendship? The seafoam and
salt from the beach past the rushes seem to say
everything I need to hear.

I wander from the longshadow bench toward
the ocean chanting creation’s ancient song,
and I sit upon a boulder
while my perforated heart beats the refrain just
beneath my hearing.

The whole universe is reclaimed, renewed,
and I, along with it, inhale the thick evidence
that sand and sun, sin and whims, have been made
One
in holy amnesia.