Wordless Moments

Wordless Moments

(“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless word they speak.” Matthew 12:36)

Do you allow it all to spill out unmeasured,
do you take the time to filter the multitudes that hive
within your head?
Do you hallow the sounds from your mouth or
do you treat the silence with sacrilege?

Have you added to the trauma, and left the victim
lying in the mud? Have you cocked your brain like
a gun at the person in pain?

Do you spend your days searching for another reason to be right?
Have you kept track of the arguments you can use to keep back the light?
Children are dying among the rubble while you discuss
second comings and end times. Mamas hold their children while
we debate arming soldiers in the streets.
I’ve watched uncounted moments dashing people’s hopes
with unsightly doctrine.
I’ve felt the shrapnel ricochet off the sky and paralyze
the objects of your screed.

Come with me to the river that speaks its peace without a word;
walk with me upon the hills where gatherer’s trod ten
thousand years ago. What did they say to the day as the
sun warmed their foreheads? What might the river remove
from all our speeches and dissertations?

Silence can be holy, stillness a sanctuary,
Unspoke can open the soul,
this-day can lighten the load of a million
thoughtless words. The sun can purify the
wounds left by experts in law. The breeze can
speak without talking and leave you wanting
for more days where life is lived inside the spheres
of pleasant and wordless moments on the road.

No One is Looking

No One is Looking

(“Our earthly fathers correct us, and we still respect them. Isn’t it even better to be given true life by letting our spiritual Father correct us?” Hebrews 12:9)

If I wish for just a few more moments,
a day, a weekend, eight days or seven,
I could prove to you I function better
with the pain annulled and my mind clearer.

And yet they ask me, in geometric proportions,
how I’m learning the lesson, with disguised assertions
about meaning and karma, all things and bad things
and the reasons they happen.

My answers are weaker as the pain has become
a red ribbon stretching past memory’s happy sky.
I have stop analyzing, asking why, and cry far more often
now that all my reasons have run dry.

Pain leaves me lonely, it is my only conversation.
8-5 is torture, my body an enemy-nation occupying the
joys once, the stories twice, and the months pass
faster while I wait for an explanation;

Or a new creation to take the leaden weight,
once free to think, beyond river’s rapport with the ocean.

I’ve cried at each limping interval;
the silence is unkempt and literal.
My sentences have no periods,
my commas are not large enough.
There are no interludes; only agony
without the ecstasy.

So, with faith a microbe and hope a single Pennsylvania firefly,
I wonder what You will do with me. Why you have done this to me.
For, in all honesty, I see no purpose now for this hotly searing
fire in my head
that sheds cold tears

When no one is looking.

You Speak to Me

You Speak to Me

(“Then he (Jesus) went up on a mountain where he could be alone and pray. Later that evening, he was still there.” Matthew 14:23)

I don’t think I could stay there all night,
in fact, I tried once, and ended up eating donuts before dawn.
There is so much power,
so much I could tell if only I could keep my feet
on the final swell from midnight till daylight.
I don’t know why I could not stay longer
with the one who,
I don’t know why,
loved me. But my mind is a prison

Of carousels and mosquitos that demand my attention.
I could excuse my thinnest moments on Your invisibility,
yet I can imagine the length and breadth of love or passion,
debates and conversations that never end. Arguments I’ll
never resolve
play merry-go-round, beginning, end, middle and then
starting someplace or other again. And the insects gnaw at
my best intentions; buzzing like radar, stinging like zeroes
and biting the truth in two.

Yet the moments when, at last, the mechanics of my mind
brake uphill and stop turning, when the gates have closed and
all conversation ceases, the quiet is dense as chocolate cream.
Frightening silence when half a newspaper, swirled by the breeze,
interrupts my reverie. The moments when the firing neurons
take their nap and leave my tiny spirit alone, the whisper of truth
which had hovered there all along, takes me hostage untethered
to a hiding place of lucidness, a cavern lit from within;

Those are when, a minute, an hour now hardly matter. For
I have heard the words I quivered to know,
thought myself unworthy to know,
and bow down, or leap up, or walk about or seek the star;
all are the delight of the solitary moments when
You speak to me.