Your Private Disaster

Your Private Disaster

(“He won’t brush aside the bruised and broken. He will be gentle with the weak and feeble, until his victory releases justice.” Matthew 12:20 [TPT])

No one saw your private disaster,
no one understood your tragedy.
So no one came to your rescue,
no one searched the sharpened canyons.

You wore your game face well,
you protected your personal hell by
slack-jaw prayer requests and
avoiding the inquests that were meant
to rein you in. But you never liked the
corrals, did you? Especially when

You could see

The open range before you.

You carried the flash floods inside you,
you erased the lines from your face just before
the grinding days deepened the furrows in your forehead.
If people looked at the layers the angry river left
they could count your history, your sandstone red
and the gray clay that marked your day.

In time they might find the candle you left burning,
the wick slowly dying in the window where you watched
doves dancing with robins looking on. The only way
they might knock on your door, these wash and wear
investigators of supernatural strength,
would be to know you were sanitized head to soul,
and showed fewer callouses and sores than you did before.

You could see

They empty road before you.

And though none came to the door, your candle
stayed lit despite the hordes who stayed away.

One light ignites another light,
one soul restores another soul,
one long and lonely day with
only a phone call to break up the hours.

But the voice, the lift from a minor key,
fills the stone silence with enough music
to, perhaps, end the day with a dance.