Once Creased with Pain

 Once Creased with Pain

(“As for Me, if I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to Myself.” John 12:32)

The day was wearily moving slowly,
eerily suggesting more than we could see.
But I had awoke too early to shatter any records
or remember any dreams that directed me gravely
toward an old headstone of a friend who once
was as enigmatic as the first few moments of
the silent breeze the cleanse my mind after resting
longer than I needed to, I was happy to recall her
smile after all. Now it’s locked in my memory the
same way her husband locked me into his own.
It was good to hear her babies lived with joy
mixed with tears, gratefulness mixed with questions,
sorrow mixed with a readiness to embrace something
more eternal than exterior views of emperors dancing
on their thrones.

We are all just jesters, aren’t we, trying to find our way home?
We are fools for fools’ sake, animals sniffing around the edges of
eternity.
It was good to hear words that let sorrow settle in like
a corporeal fog, something we could touch in the distance.
It all brings back to mind the days we sat around propane fires
watching the meat boil and the people waiting together,
giving away blankets and quilts, and saying the things we
would carry for longer than we knew.

We have learned to forgive ourselves of the behaviors we
learned to save us from the trauma we could not name.
We thought it was simply a sinful self that kept us addicted
to ways we soften the pain. But now somehow,
the crucified one has taken all the damage onto a splintery
tree, made that torturous cross his throne by which he
calls us to tell him the harm we could not name until we knew,
he felt it too.

How are we daily drawn by the magnetism of unreserved love.?
How do we imagine a place that soothes every reason we have to
push to the front of a line that will take the same time for us all.?
Ending at the entrance, all together now, we see the relief on faces
that once were creased by pain.