The Dust We Kick Up

The Dust We Kick Up

(“Wasn’t it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Luke 24:46)

Silence sits like a smiling seraph
watching the fog dispelled as the afternoon grows long.
We sprint like we have no time,
and hope the dust we kick up will settle by night.
All the while the divine movement,
a sun outpoured, an avant-garde line in an
unread poem,
invites us to linger. It entices us to wait until
winning is the last thing on our mind.

Despondent, though the breeze tried to revive our
deflation,
we still walked home. We still journeyed. We share our
fruit and fish with others on the road.

Who knew? The question never entered our minds. That
the story was not over. We still had miles to go. We still had
callouses from planting, bleary eyes from wanting it to
be easy. We knew the enemy well. We knew we followed
lamely. We knew something more than bedtime stories had
to be our benediction.

But we never counted on a universe that groaned with love like
a mother birthing a firstborn. We never counted on suffering to
be the picture i.d. of the power that moves through kingdoms and
ages, villages and sages, crosses and aching; we never counted on
god squeezing through such a dirty knothole to find us

On the other side.