A New Place to Listen

A New Place to Listen

(“Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you by prophecy when the elders laid their hands on you.” 1 Timothy 4:14)

I heard you crying like a child who cannot wake up.
We cradle them until the brightness returns.
We wait for the sun and forget the rain,
we talk until 2 in the morning, we drink coffee
until the same.

Our tears were distilled and run through the mill.
Our weariness overtook every plan we had made.
Could I tell you one more time how it means so
much to me
to have you fan into flame what sometimes disappears
beyond my fenced imagination? I fear sometimes
that insulation has hindered my brain and I’ve forgotten
the exact, the point, the meaning of it all. I want to give
it all away
again.

When we reach so distantly, insisting there must be
a way to discover something new, we play some jazz
and memorize the patterns that improvised over our heads.

I took a bottle of wine to my friend who had cried
for days. He could not put his finger on it, and I knew
less than he,
so we poured our glasses and reminisced on better times.
We recognized in each other’s eyes the questions that had
hemmed us in like concrete. He told me he never imagined
he would turn solo after so long. I was silent, I knew what
he meant.

We once understood the steps in the dance that brought
the delight of heavenly joy. We were players, we were
instrumentalists, we were singers some of the time.
But now we couldn’t find a venue to play. We hummed
a few tunes while we finished our wine and decided to find
a new place to listen to the music we missed and find
one or two who would learn them through like children.
We were ready to be useful again.

On the Patio

On the Patio

(“Do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” Hebrews 13:16)

Afterwards we ran inside to escape the rain.
But until then we had been breaking bread on the
patio surrounded by palm trees and bougainvillea.
The music was loud, our feet were tapping the concrete floor,
and the children hopped like sugary frogs.
Nearly the entire neighborhood was there, invited
on a whim. The grills were hissing, the dogs were
growling playfully waiting for every morsel
intentionally dropped their direction.
We ignored social graces and didn’t set places
based on early reservations. We
sat where we wanted,
stood and chatted like geese populating a mown field.

The sun had warmed the day, pushed the clouds away until
midafternoon. We laughed at silly jokes, some we’d told
since childhood.
No one cared except the stray teenager who heard and
rolled his eyes and then told it to his cadre of bros.
The cats, domestic and feral, soaked in the sun,
stretched out like tablecloths on the warming driveway.
No one talked of God, or angels, or sanity, or delusions.
We didn’t test the temperature of faith or check the boxes
of doctrinal hoaxes. We had no need of talk, no requirements
ticked of on ballots. It was lately the place where
names were memorized and acceptance ubiquitous.
Men remade amends, women healed the wounded,
children built memories out of legos and no one was
left out in the cold.

And then the deluge, then the downpour, then the dash
for irony that what started outside with more room than
we ever needed was
forced inside where we stood face to face, shoulder
to
shoulder
and nothing changed. Everyone sang. We ate and
then ate again.

It Used to be a Cathedral

It Used to be a Cathedral

(“You neglect what is more important in the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness! Matthew 23:23b)

They think they have it all figured out,
they post their demands on the underlings’ foreheads.
They think their cause is just when it is
merely
the same chant they’ve hummed from day one.
They fashion their bombs and measure them by the ton;
they load their words like ammo for a machine gun.
They insist everyone pays their way;
they record everything they say and
play it back
just to listen to their own voice.

All the while the song beckons from
under our feet and over our heads;
the song is no longer today than then,
but we mishear it and shoot ourselves in the foot.

It used to be a cathedral,
now it is just an armory.
It used to be a library, but all the books have
been banned, they’ve been burned,
they’ve been ripped to pieces by incisors
of know-it-alls who never learned to celebrate
the paragraphs the send us into the world.

Every book you erase leaves another author
ready to rearrange tomorrow like it needed to be.
Go fold your laundry, find a good book,
get a glass of wine and read something classic,
or challenging,
or, if heaven allows, something rambling
that opens the world to take that little house on the corner,
open the doors
and allow the stragglers a place at the table.

They think they have the answers;
they have written them on index cards.
They think the lyrics should never be played backwards,
and ignore the plainsong that used to
remove the cannons from the parapets and
melt them into fork and spoons, along with the food,
that never was paid for in the first place.

They think we’ll be impressed with how
impeccably that are dressed. But we are just fine
with thrift store finds. We are waiting for
the day when we obey the truce that was
declared ages ago. We are ready to shed
our garments of pain and leave the battlefield,

Transforming it into a park with a bandshell
where the song is flung in every direction and the
children play undetected where we once
wrestled forged enemies to the ground.