Like Blindfolded Children

Like Blindfolded Children

(“I was like eyes for the blind, like feet for the crippled.” Job 29:15)

I saw your face and the only thing I could think
was to ask if it was okay for me to say
that I miss you?
You weren’t the first to limp for me
when I had pretended to walk upright for years.
Studying the early morning light
was just another way to disguise my blindness.
It was no fault of my own,
and you saw none to begin with,
but I always depended on your description of
the day to remind me where love began and
rejection ended. I remember you did cartwheels
on my front lawn.

Hanging by your knees from the parallel bars
you saw me inverted; my feet had been burned from
walking on asphalt all summer. But your laugh
was July’s tune, your play like a kitten showing
how long it could hang on the living room drapes
in the sun.

We began the way that all children do;
hide-and-go-seek until it was too dark to
see the secret place in the grove of trees just
between the public park and the old tool shed
we swore was haunted. You would have carried
me on your back, but you were smaller than I was.
So you slowed your pace, and with childlike grace
that displaces adult apprehensions, you showed me
the dance floor, the gazebo, where teenagers pretended to be
married
by the neighbor next door.

Do I know your face? How can you ask? Though years
have stubbornly kept us apart like continental drift,
your laugh is as young as the last day of summer
50 years ago.

There is a grandmother here in town (we are both now
grands, can you believe it?) There is a grandmother in town
who entertains every visitor that sits on her couch and
every baby placed upon her lap.

How old shall we be before we can play again
like blindfolded children swinging at a pinata?
How far we have come, how near do I believe you to be,
(though my thoughts often deceive me.) How long until
we walk a dusky evening with nothing more than
a bunch of grapes and roll down the hill until
our jeans are grass-stained with the imprints of impossibility?
I could see more easily when you were there to guide me.

I Do Not Want You to Know I Limp

I Do Not Want You to Know I Limp

(“Grass dies and flowers fall, but the word of our God lasts forever.” Isaiah 40:8)

I do not want you to know I limp, at least not
when you watch me walk.
I had a bone spur removed a decade ago
and now the joint of my big toe
grinds bone against bone.

I should have it looked at, I should have surgery,
but I walk my mile-and-a-half now, stride matching stride,
so you cannot see my pain.

I will talk to you about my toe, and complain,
but I do not want you to know I limp.

I do not want you to know my heart is darkness, at
least not when I’m alone in the night.
I had an old self removed nearly five decades ago
and the new one, still a seedling,
sprouts slow against slow.

I should have watered it, I should sit in the sun,
but I walk my life-and-a-half now, dusk versus dawn,
so you cannot call my bluff.

I will talk to you about my faith, earthy stuff,
but I do not want you to know my
heart is darkness.

It is late February and the daffodils have not bloomed,
the tulips should soon peek through their winter tombs.
The bulbs, all dirt and mud, have yawned across the winter
until long sun and vast days pull them toward the stars again.

All the world is waiting for the uncrumbling of nature
to reveal the limps we hid from fear,
and the hearts we coddled for ego’s sake,
when all that ever lasts forever is
the unseen Word, the Poetry, the Song,
the dance that limps with the hurt and
the heart that started the seedling,
the Alpha and Omega of everything.