Danced Like Toddlers

Danced Like Toddlers

(“As soon as I heard the sound of your voice, the baby inside me jumped for joy.” Luke 1:44)

Could all this mean that we were born to be dancing,
scooting around the rhythmic floor with higher dimensions?
Could our feet move at the first sentence sent from the
purest hearts? Could our hands clap at the sound of the
leaves falling for joy? I’ve fallen for stories like this before,
and was sometimes deeply disappointed. But what if we still
were meant to listen for the next story, then turn our ears
toward the familiar music with a new way of hearing. We hear
the frequencies as we listen with new angles, as we attend to
the old tunes with simple guitar and drum and feel like
sliding all the way across the ballroom.

The pulses of joy rearranged our thinking,
the words barely full-throated and we were ready.
The echoes off the walls and mountains, the repeated
verses from peak to peak celebrate
a dawn like no other. A day hardly begun
and we are ready to walk the way we had
hoped to follow so many ages ago.

We swore we had attempted it, we remembered
the day it left us behind. We mourned our losses,
we grieved the silent pain. We could not resurrect
a single note of the ancient song.

But this refrain, reframed in such solitary silhouette,
opened the cracks where the light had filtered
in for ages. But now, unhindered, the music drew us
to cacophonous celebrations. Oh, that we were still young
enough
to cartwheel across the yard. Our voices are aging
and barely find the notes, but it matters less than the
dancing that renewed our crooked feet. That day when
the song crept in to find us in our darkened caverns
was the day we walked into the light, finally, in years. And
old as we were from the hiding and cold, we danced
like toddlers trying to hop for the very first time.

He Called it Presence

He Called it Presence

(“When they suffered, he suffered with them.” Isaiah 63:9a)

He danced the dirge like a ghost,
and felt like a silent shade. There was
nothing substantial he could remember.
There was nothing future he could predict.
He pulled the sod up over his shoulders like
a blanket to keep out the cold.
There was no one there for him,
at least that is what he was told.

It was like the beginning of creation,
It was less than the sun could shine.
It was like the last day of celebration.
It was more than the moon had to show.

He never thought anyone knew,
He never saw the eyes that saw him.
But there was another dancing, another echoing
his sad spinning. He did not think he was suffering.
The truth is, he did not think much at all.
But he could not help but see there was another
day someone might call apostasy.
He just called it presence and kept up his
sojourning ways while his heart gave way
to the questions he had been asking for
a lifetime.

Would the one who began it all
finally move his direction? Would the last
of days, ancient in its ways,
feel the tears as hot as his own?
He hoped it was so. Neither questions nor
answers
soothed him in these rotating seasons.
He just hoped the unknown visitor would
stop by before the end of the day.