Imperfection, Like Driftwood

Imperfection, Like Driftwood

(“Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.” Psalm 50:2)

It rained all day yesterday,
was dog day sunny two days before,
and in-between, where bare thoughts meet
the covered skin of wrinkles and sag,
I found another imperfection, like driftwood from
a rotting logging cabin.

We knew that age would show up;
shrinking icebergs and sanded obsidian lie
upon the earth as
testament or
transgression

While I have the skin torn off my back,
an incision to excise
invasive cells I had never noticed;
like the dark side of the moon,
I had no idea what was living there.

My elbows are gritty from leaning on the linen,
my face and back are dotted with pigments from
the sun and from
the ancestors
who transferred nothing but their
DNA
to the thin shield of my skin.

But You (not the sun) shine on me in
perfection.
In my fading cells Your fascination with me
(all dying is resurrection)
aligns my soul to lie upon the water,
my face to the Bright,
let the wings of Your love
hum the song I’ve forgotten but
known all along.

As the scars will prove,
nothing here lasts forever;
not even the words I struggle to strap to the page.
This house I live is showing its age. But the
love of a thousand friends times ten thousand days
will stay
as my echoed song in frequencies of tranquil
days,
blazing worship and
uncovered praise.

Mud and Roses

Mud and Roses

("What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?")

The smell of mud and roses,
that is how the chosen perceive the world.
We cannot embrace perfection, but love the spaces between
earth and bud, bloom and dirt. First the rain leaves pockmarks upon
the garden bed,
then the earthworms sneak along the perimeter before light plays
upon the newly broken clods. Robins meet for morning breakfast
and coffee
and a little to go to feed their young.

The perfect green stems with new rubbery needles embrace
last year's old growth now gray and stiff, their thorns more apt
for a Messiah's crown.

You cannot work the ground alone. You cannot inhale the garden's perfume
in a florist's shop. One is rich, one is sterile. And yet in the garden they are
the prelude to the day, the annunciation of sun, the breeze's benediction at
the lowering of the afternoon.

The chosen do not consume doctrine devoid of mud nor roses apart from
the dusty hands that tended them.

Faith is the moment where earth and roses meet, where lotuses bloom on
muddy ponds, where divine and human see each other in the beloved space
of imperfection's grace.