Torrents of Rain

Torrents of Rain

(“O Lord, restore our well-being, just as the streams in the arid south are replenished.” Psalm 126:3)

Don’t let the fantasy of uneasy paragraphs
persuade you that the everything is glued,
everything is static,
everything is anti-motion. The stars are
moving away from us a trillion miles away.

Don’t let the certainty of ambiguity convince you
the rains are gone. Don’t let the clouds on the horizon
obscure the coming day. Lighter than the mountains,
denser that the sun,
invited by petition,
stretched like the ocean’s horizon,
hold the hope that yesterday’s promises bring.

The fog burned off quicker than I guessed,
the light, though slanted late summer,
reached my porch before the evening fell.
We examined every exposed corner where
the light bent to reveal life hidden behind the
outcroppings of doubt.

The wadis were waiting, the dried riverbed
asleep and dry. The pilgrims plod the
unkempt desert floor; the preachers are not
certain, though they have set a new date for
the end of the world. Do they every stop their
silly prophecies once the storms do not gather
like the have pontificated? Do they admit the harm
their proclamations have done?

There is a rainy season; there is a time when
water will fill the desert again. It does not come
from ego-saturation, it does not arrive because
someone painted sign with the exact date and time.
You can no more command the rain than you can
tie the wind with a half-hitch, tethering it to the mountains.

There is a season for ease; there is a gracious month
when the Spirit will fill the waiting again. She comes
when least expected; she fills the imagination; she washes
the religious dust away. You can no more command the
Spirit than you can turn the earth with your hands.

As a matter of fact, there is far more water to quench
your soul
than all the suns in the universe. Watch the desert
late evening silhouette. Let the peace that pursues the
thirsty make an oasis of your tear-dried tongues. No need
to ration anything. It is time to share the overflow
that comes from the joyous music of torrents of rain
we thought would never arrive.

Spinning a Narrative

Spinning a Narrative

(“I know what you have done, and that you are neither cold nor hot.” Revelation 3:15)

I would listen and, knowing what others
had said they had heard,
would scar my soul over the silence that
did not flow
but was the weight of summer obscurity.

I thought my sight was blurred,
my ears unhearing the very thing
I wished to find.

Lock me in my room, and do not let me out
until I’ve spent the night in the sweetest reverie
I’ve read about from men of old,
women like angels told,
and stories unfolded by names I heard quoted
at meetings of the devoted.

I paced, I read, I played three chords;
instead of songs or lengthy prayer
my eyelids like lead scratched my waiting watch.

I was certain no one had longed as deeply as I,
yet there was only the shallow dribble of my own mind’s
constant turbine spinning a narrative that has followed from
then until now. What I believed, hope and sought was
never as glowing as
the fireside stories; of parables in street shoes
and the buried treasure always discovered for the effort.

I have chased You, only Father, not well. I am tired,
I am weary, I have gone this far on this tiny soul’s
capacity alone.

Let me rest now, my breath is shallow. The rain has beat
upon the windows through the night
and the puddles are deep in the sunken footprints

Of a man who carried a mislaid burden much too far
up the mountain.

And yet the tears remind me there is so much love
I could never be satisfied, never filled, never stalling;
for the laying down of my burden is the only action
that leaves no footprints for the torrents to fill.