What All the Writing Was For

What All the Writing Was For

(“Stand up! Shine brightly! Now your light has come! The Lord's glory has risen to shine on you.” Isaiah 60:1)

It wasn’t the suffocating clouds that stopped him from breathing,
nor the ice wind that circled his feet.
He could not quite place it, perhaps the solitude had become
his undoing. Perhaps it was not the retreat he needed.
He saw as many stars as
the men in the next valley.
Though hidden, the same sun would crack the sky
occasionally, a hint that things moved the same
direction as they had from the beginning.
But the winter captured every hope and,
reversing course,
froze his loneliness in place.

He loved to see the eagles atop the douglas firs,
the cows and calves nuzzling in the fields. But
the threads
that ran from friend to friend were
too fragile to bind much together these days.
He feared they had broken, and loosened,
had floated with the northern breeze. He
feared they had been dropped into the river.
And he was too weary to weave new tapestries,
too late, too far, too distant, too afraid
to see them unravel again.

So he wrote. He would send it to every pair of eyes
that had ever seen him truly. But they would think him
far more needy
than the man they knew before.
So he wrote. And sent it like paper boats on
the river to
the ocean to
the continent next door.

And he would not be disappointed that
no one answered. How could they know what
all the writing was for?