Like Cows in the Fog

Like Cows in the Fog

(“’My brothers,’ he said. ‘I have conducted myself before God in a completely good conscience all my life up to this day.’” Acts 23:1)

Like cows in the fog,
black specters on the savannah,
we looked like strangers, but we belonged there.

It got to the point where we always said,
“I’m fine”
when people asked who never made up their mind
to come closer,
to see better,
to hear the bellows of creatures left out in the cold.

We are all looking for a better love,
a higher sun that looks deeper than the droplets that
mask our view. We are all hoping for better apologies,
higher comedies that laugh
only at our own misperceptions.

I know you are not fine. I know you juggle
tears and eggshells on the floor everywhere you walk.
I know you hide it well,
but not from me,
not from me.
I know you seek a cavern deep inside yourself,
a pattern that turns the years inside out,
a hand that takes you outside yourself
for one day or two.
I know you long for,
cannot believe, but hope for,
a light through the fog that sees you
more clearly than you see yourself.

We looked like strangers. But
we hoped to be arranged in a way
that left us leaning together,
unafraid to say,
I’m not as fine as I let on.”
And trust the honesty will pierce the haze
we always believed would hide us from the
worst of days. We need something fiercer than
words that push the best gifts away. We need to
simply

Stay.

Everywhere I See Him

     

Everywhere I See Him

(“But Paul claimed that Jesus is alive.” Acts 25:19b)

Everywhere I see him;
it once was not so. I could not see
the connections, the instruments were
untuned
and I could not discern the key.

But every cloud holds him now,
every raindrop transports me now
to beats and tones where the divine
is hidden. Up day. Out night. Up beat.
Sing light. Even the
blue notes
move me to cry tears along with him.

I followed, I know that you know,
but the world was divided, music and
spirit
collided
and footsteps were either dung or mud.

But now the world is one,
the most dangerous of places, beauty is seldom
found in the safest faces. The edge of the precipice,
and one foot more,
there I will explore the joy that steps outside of tombs
into gardens where doves sit on branches to greet the sun.

Could it rain any harder? Could my heart feel any dryer?
Yet the agony abates because
the demons I thought once feasted on my defeats
were birth pangs instead. Misery drove me to
break my knees on concrete floors setting a course for
all night prayers that lasted twenty minutes. I was
deflated.

I was not. I was embraced and did not feel it until
the day opened, the fog lifted, the noise drifted into
the dark lake swallowed whole. And I could hear the bells toll
from a half mile over the hill. I hear them still

In jazz and blues, in mother and child, in lemons and apples,
in novels and poetry, in elders and babies. I hear them even
in the voices just as frightened as I once was. But now,

I see him everywhere.