Instead, I Sat on Porches

Instead, I Sat on Porches

(“The owner of the vineyard said, ‘What will I do now? I will send my son whom I love. Maybe they will respect him.’” Luke 20:13)

We are marvelous manufacturers
turning poison into water and water into poison.
We mistake dust for gold, and gold for panna cotta
eaten by the masses.
When someone lies, we don’t care as long as it fits the
story we’ve told. We want to be owners of the fields,
the proclamations, the minds and fascinations others must
never conceive.
How could anyone believe such insanity as
the silent discovery that our encased brains do not hold
the libraries of the world. They do not contain the languages
of ages. They are not filled with altruism. And if the peg does
not fit in the hole
we will whittle it into shape and call it our own.

I was waiting for the train to take me around the world,
to carry me backwards to where my soul first lived, where
my legs moved effortlessly, and my eyes were clear. I waited
on the platform to circle the earth, to slalom between the clouds,
to fall like rain on the manicured roses and wild daisies below.
The ticket was free.
It was given to me. And I could think of no other journey I
wanted to make that day. Though I envisioned heaven, we began
in Nashville, north to Cincinnati, and on to the Bronx where
I still waited for cirrus and cumulus to take me in. Instead, I
sat on porches. I heard about the rationing of rubber, the lines
for bread, the unsaid memories that were time machines for the asking.

The wrinkled faces broke my agendas. The thinning golden-brown skin
worn by sun and smiles stirred me like the lake just before the rains come in.
I did meet one University President, a nice enough fellow. But he was ready
to refute my position before he knew what my position might be.
And I shared sandwiches with a hermit convinced he knew the weather on
each day for the past millennium.

We, with untethered minds, assumed we were the gravity that pulled all
the truth of the universe so
carefully toward us that no one could disagree. And the
clouds still gathered. The hungry still waited. And the handful watched
to greet love in whatever form it arrived.