Wide Open

Wide Open

(“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God.” John 1:1)

Wide open is where I want to stay,
walking on the paths, laughing daffodils and
seeing your Lyrics in every passing cloud.

Every missile launched rewrites the history
that divine language has conceived. Every
reference to war
erases the First metaphor written in
holy DNA; the life of the Beloved.

Every day is a rehearsal and bids us
memorize
the Song we first heard that caused us to
swoon at the mention of the Prince of Peace.
Every moment bids us to come closer to the
Sound we might have rejected had we
shut our ears to the Song that carried us
from a single spot of dirt on the earth
you created in Artistic collaboration.

Every piercing remark leaves a scar on
the hearts that were meant to dance at the
invitation to war-no-more.

We are curious
and want to hear more. We throw ourselves open
and listen for the beginning from the end,
for the Message you sent from front to back,
around the utter reaches of universal stars to
the patch of earth occupied by two simple feet
learning to Dance anew.

On Post Office Walls

On Post Office Walls

(“Yahweh said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they tell you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me as the king over them.’” 1 Samuel 8:7)

We cannot survive on silence,
the space between molecules gives us
nothing better than the missing pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle.

Have you ever seen one of those posters hung
on post office walls, or stapled to a telephone-pole?
The picture is a wide-smiling woman, business-casual,
and glad to have been photographed. “If you want to
enjoy your life
like her” it says, “Call the number below.”
You’ve seen them, I know you have. And along the
bottom of the poster tags are cut like a dozen tiny tickets.
Tear one off and take the phone number with you. Only,
this one, the one that caught your eye, the one that might change
your life,
has been stripped of every tag with its magic number.

God, we cannot hold you. You are worse than water to grasp.
We would pull you down like a string on a kite; we would
tug the tail of your coat until you recognized our smallish face.
But we only grip nearly weightless mass as the air passes
between our fingers.

We cannot populate invisible planets. Even if we could touch
without seeing, each step would be dread, not seeing the green, the yellow
or red. Hopscotch would be impossible; prodigals would never find
their way back to the homestead. Most frightening would be the
demagogue who said only he could see.

We do not want your Second, your Administrative Assistant.
We cannot live on mere representations of the only thing
we really want to know. Nations beg for rulers; democracies are
the worst. We expect the one who says she knows you best
will make it all comprehensible; the one who says he’s closer
than the rest…but both remind us of

One of those posters hung on post office walls.