Candles Flicker

 

Candles Flicker

(“Father, may your name be honored. May your kingdom come.” Luke 11:2b)

Candles flicker though the wind pinwheels the leaves
on the old cedar bridging earth and sky.
Framed between the windowpanes,
the light reflects; the flame a translucent etching
on the glass revealing the trees. Flame a stained glass
hologram, trees the earthy energy of well-designed atoms.

Through whirlwinds and warring factions
the view was nearly besieged by the time
my heart had dried rough as my thinning skin.
Almost extinguished

I felt the Spirit supply the fuel for the wick
that smoldered in molten wax. The quiet became
like a hurricane; the quiet reframed
what I could not explain. The quiet renamed the
noise of my pain and lifted it past the oldest

Branches touching the sky.

Tears, painful rhythms without reason,
had seized me awake and asleep while I
begged
for relief. And still my dreams cried like
a fugitive waiting to be apprehended.
What father would leave me to suffer on my own?

I clawed my way back to you. (what god demands
this scraping of knuckles and knees?) I clawed and
I could not escape you. (what love follows to
the bloody foxholes and awaits our wounds?)

My house is built on land where the Clatskanie
once hunted and fished. They say I own it,
I wish I didn’t. The hills, the river, the salmon, the
douglas firs and dancing streams belong
to no one.

And mon père, that is when I remember how the
Spirit speaks,
how she whispers around spinning leaves and
glowing candles,
how the world is engulfed so silent that
it has taken these crumbling days alone
to replace the agony of war-torn fissures
with the kingdom of one, the kingdom that has come,
the kingdom that is from and through,
that never withdrew, but lights one more
candle until the storm and still
are one will done
on earth
as in heaven.