Perhaps If We Paused

Perhaps If We Paused

(“If any of you needs wisdom, you should ask God for it. He will give it to you. God gives freely to everyone and doesn’t find fault.” James 1:5)

I appreciate your visit, at least I know where I stand.
You brought your talking points, numbered and outlined,
scrawled in your own hand. Some were new, but one was
a decade old.
Hadn’t we beat that one into the ground? Wasn’t it dust
sent on the wind ages ago?

But since then, you have never visited again. Did the
storms blow, knocking down the hedgerow we planted?
Did the crows steal the seeds of peace?

The seasons still turn, though, 16 since then. The pictures
move
in memory like a flickering silent film. The words hide,
buried beneath grains of sand, beyond a million stars,
outside the radius of our reach. We send flares in the night,
but the colors were wrong. We wave at trucks and cars,
hoping someone notices our pace has slowed, our smile
is frozen in place, and our feet have worn paths into the
grass between the road and the river.

What was our baptism if the water never washed
our misdirections out to sea? Did the showers rain on
you and not on
me?

But we are fathoms, we are not phantoms. We are universes,
we are mites. We are not airless, but we are children of the wind.

Did we pass each other yesterday? Did our globes rotate to
coordinates that stopped us, same place, for a moment in time?
Did we both see the face that wondered how friendship was
so fragile,
how two men of billions walked a path together,
and then lost sight of the north star?

Perhaps if we paused before unwashed words settled in the
air
like smoke from a distant fire. Perhaps if we learned that
laughter is as good as wisdom, campfires are as good as
generosity, and freedom is cultivated by the light of
a myriad of wicks lit before dawn.