Like Desert Provocations

 Like Desert Provocations

(“‘You will not succeed by your own strength or by your own power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord All-Powerful.” Zechariah 4:6b)

The opinions stood out on the desert floor like
provocations, pine nuts in pasta. And still, we will not
admit
that we cannot see more than three feet
in front of us. All our blind theology
fuels warplanes and necessary conflict.
All our certainty sets up the fighter’s cage
where the sun scraped every inch of humanity from
the combatants.

Men read book after book to justify
their dominance, their fists that excuse every
pummeled wall as they try to take back a country
that never belonged to them.
Their women
submit
because
the bible tells them so.
Then men insist
because
Jesus called them to be
warriors. There is nothing sorrier
than queues of soldiers
being told they are doing it for god.

We have looked for divine vengeance in
explosive independence. We have mummified
Jesus,
tying his rugged hands to national flags,
tying his dust covered feet, contorting them
into unreliable combat boots that stir the smoke
that blinds us still.
The eyes of god never looked so frightening
than when
we defined them as our policy of civil defense.

We need the desert again, oh fathers. We need the
silence to offer our daughters. We need the solos again,
oh mothers. We need the
lullabies to solace our sons.

And once the discord is discarded,
once we admit our shallow discontent,
we may see, we may hear, we may listen like
lost dogs who have found their way home.
We may discover the Spirit never obeys
our transgressions. We may discover the Spirit
always
lifts us alive from
the carnalities of war.