Kids Playing Giddily

Kids Playing Giddily

(“Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.” Colossians 3:11)

The lenses I used to use only saw the unabused
and kept the battered in the dark. I could see them
if I wanted
but only to point out their obvious flaws.
Did hide them or did they shrink from my view?
I could not help but think their invisibility was their own failing;
my blindness was sanctified by voices from emperors and pulpits.

Then yesterday I was wondering where all the lonely people go
when I refuse to see them in their fully grown human glow. Then yesterday
the light broke in and shattered the mirror I had been primping in.
I looked again and saw the cracks and splinters that had hindered
my access to the truth.

I thought I might be pulled into the uncrafted classrooms
that taught
nothing but invented stories about the minds behind the
eyes of the people I never wanted to see. But yesterday I
sat down in the back of the room and heard languages I
did not understand.

But the cadence was familiar. The emphasis on the third syllable
of a sentence or the rising of a voice after a question. My pilgrimage
had led me here so I decided to stay. They gave me a name tag
for my shirt and I wrote as plainly as I could. I learned these were
all graduates from a school just down the road from the
block I grew up on. Now I heard their voices and they sounded
like my neighbor’s kids playing giddily in the yard. I had to admit
I missed the playfulness and changed my lenses to see

Everyone who was different from me. And I joined them,
learned their language, and sat in their circle learning the
inclusive invitations of the spirit’s voice.

Percentages

Percentages

(“May the glorious presence of the Eternal linger among us forever. And may He rejoice in the greatness of His own works.” Psalm 140:31)

Within the warp and woof of creation are colors undiscovered,
shapes unobserved, motion rounder, speed louder, and stillness
crowding out the constant hum of men rubbing two sticks together
and sending fireballs beyond the stretches of the cosmos.

We are children playing in the sand.

Where appearances meet the titles we’ve tagged; we have
defined
the eternal with four or five words, left it at that,
and expected the universe to bow at our ingenious
vocabulary.

We are blacksmiths rewriting a thesaurus.

Where mass is great we cannot see it,
where velocity is so fast we cannot perceive it,
where colors run from midnight blue to blinding sun,
we have hung our titles on the split-seconds we occupy.

Yet, for all our names and titles, autographs and aliases,
we are just as distant from yesterday’s bee sting
and the beginning before events had definitions.

The glorious Presence, the power at each grand intersection,
the silence between the galaxies, the songs beneath the seas,
all exist, unnamed, untamed;

And we experience the first note like the lingering aroma of
the morning’s first cup of coffee while lunch is prepared.

We are children, we are blacksmiths, we are namers, we are rhymers,
we know more, and know nothing; percentages are slight slivers.

But forever the Name, the Creation’s Love, the Life Poet
lets us play within His masterpiece. And, putting down our
pen for one moment longer, we cannot name it,
but today the breeze is not merely weather, flowers not
simply horticulture, and we, are,

Unnamable.