After the Fire

 

After the Fire

(“After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire, there was a quiet, gentle voice.” 1 Kings 19:12)

I am weary of the quiet with no faces to watch,
though I open the windows and close all the screens.
All I see are the birds flying between my house and the trees.

My mind traverses back to sunny days
on be-cattled hills. Two or three friends,
a guitar and a song, silly stories and
the sky filling our faces.

I coveted the fire. I had heard the stories;
people hiding behind the piano in the corner of the church
just waiting for the flames of God
to ignite them like rocket engines.
I only experienced jet lag.

I begged for the wind. I had heard the tales;
people unexpectedly flying above the earth
with divine wind in their sails. Sometimes they
did not alight for days.
I was displaced by a tornado.

I would prefer not to write about the earthquakes.
They left me broken, split apart like glacial stones.
They pushed me down from the mountain and left me
disoriented, sad and too far from home. The
fault-line
ran straight through my soul.

But I would sit all day unworded with
a friend who let the silence pass between us
like the slow bloom of the cherry tree,
like the change in the wind after a storm,
like the ashes who recognize they have already been burned,
like a dandelion being born.

After the fire I might sleep for a while.
After the fire, then the
whisper.