How Well Do You Hear?

 How Well Do You Hear?

(“For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own who are in bonds.” Psalm 69:33)

Stand on the hills that rise steeply
above the river.
Listen to the silence of its wide and winding traverse.
There is a universe you cannot see when you
stand so high above everybody.
Descend, take your time, end at sea level where

The bridge

Shelters a dozen and a half humans shivering
under its girders and steel.

Now choose what you view.

Do you breathe the mildewed air,
do you leave your boots strung from a tree limb
and hope they will dry by morning?
Do you hide when the flashlights intrude on
your children without warning?
Do you eat slowly to make it last,
or quickly before it is gone?

Sometimes the sirens sound for one who wandered
too close to the edge. Sometimes we want to exchange them
like batteries on their last legs. Sometimes they live forgotten
just beyond the reach of our consciousness.

And yet

They huddle closer on the slippery rocks under

The bridge.

While we tear down their tents and cities and hope they will
vagabond elsewhere.

How well do you hear, o follower of the One
who had no place to lay his head? How well
do you sleep while they smoke nervous cigarettes
because the night, the rain, the hunger, the pain
keep them up dreamless. One of them

Found a discarded couch, yellow and old,
and claimed it for a day.

See Us More Clearly

See Us More Clearly

"For the sake of your name, don’t despise us. Don’t dishonor your glorious throne. Remember your promise to us; don’t break it." Jeremiah 14:21)

Please see us more clearly than we see

ourselves,

here we bring our votives and underlying motives

wondering why our turns of left and right and our

circles of up and down

leave us just as grounded as before.

We would fly if we could, (some pretend that we do),

we would beat back the momentum of our own

dishonesty, except our own family tell us

all we believe is true.

Please see the red in our eyes, (anger or crying,

sometimes a mere disguise). We give no excuses,

though we choose to sometimes blame it on the way

we have been created. (Me, not you. The yous abuse

every freedom they are given. The theys are tireless and

wicked without reason.) But we confess, and confess, and

confess, and it sounds like all the rest who cannot find a

place to admit, we vote for ugly then never regret what we get.

Please send your grace just now, and open our hearts to receive it.

We have lived so long as if we are right, we have forgotten how to admit

a journey filled with center-vision that refuses to see the

abused, the crying, the unwell, the dying,

the never-church, the basement pray-er, the mudcake poems

fascinated with grubs and ants and slugs. Earth is too dirty

to allow on the carpet between our pews.

Please send your Spirit; this time we will not refuse her friends

that always accompany her presence. She brings lilies of the day,

but dandelions too. She shares the scent of love that fills every room

and edits every ungodly no-love forward from Youtube or

presidential campaigns. She brings pain, she brings hope,

she brings tears, she brings old jokes we used to tell.

Please send her and we will never pretend

again,

that it was our singing, or our shouting, or our goodness
that brought her here within.