Our Long Journey

Our Long Journey

(“Won’t God give justice to his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” Luke 18:7a)

It felt like we had stood in line
for more than the circumference of time.
The asphalt melted our feet,
the tears evaporated in the heat,
the rush of muddy water, the river, the boundary
between journey and sojourn,
was our salvation, or our final destination.
We cried out for days to heads of state
whose ears were tickled by impoverished views of
unwashed throngs who left footprints behind them
a thousand miles long.

We immersed ourselves in suffering, we did not choose it.
We crossed horizons, we crawled when the canyons fell
below us. The songs caught up to us; we moved slowly enough
to carry them in our chests like anthems and amens,
the beginning and end of our petitions for
a hearing before we reached the border line.

There were rainbows hiking with us, the colors proud
as we took them into our fold. There were eunuchs and
pagans,
priests and variations of supplication. There were the
silent. There were the opalescent. There were the angry,
the defeated, the determined, the babies, the children,
the ancestors and all the rest. We all were seeking
a place among
the rising tide we were promised by the ancient
declarations,
the independent proclamations,
the handbills dropped from the sky that promised
a rebirth of unity.

It felt like we had stood in line
far longer than the foundations of nations
that fancied themselves beacons upon hills.
It felt like we would be waiting until a greater
Justice
would be our Advocate. We waited, and knew,
if only micro-dots per day, soon or late, we would know
slowly
our long journey was no longer wandering. Our long
journey
was stumbling upon the
New
Creation.

All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

(“That’s why the spring was called, ‘The Well of the Living One who Looks after Me.’” Genesis 16:14a)

He side-stepped into town; didn’t want his face to be seen.
He stepped over every crack, carried dried bread in his pockets.
He was from another country, he rarely heard his own language.
His face was crusted like a coal miner’s map. He never liked
being watched. He would step into the shadows. He never liked
being asked where he was from, or how he got to where he was.
Every road was different, every meal the same. All he wanted was
silence.
All he wanted was to know his name.
He watched for movement behind the trees, limbs that moved against
the breeze. He listened for snapping twigs, for whispers, for a
stray dog’s bark, or perhaps the sun and shadow colliding just ahead.
No one knew him. No one ever did. He moved through time,
past tilting billboards, around rail stations abandoned like scarecrows
in the desert.
He read every cloud. He rehearsed every line of the day. He memorized
all he had forgotten from the day before.
Suspended in the space between nearly and always,
he rarely stopped. The future was inevitable. Dust devils
were the only messengers of god he knew.

Then his luck ran out. His tank was empty. His feet curled in on themselves,
his brain sought the solace of shade and croaking frogs beside a
farmer’s duck pond. He let his guard down. He let the spare breath
he had
form words he feared. He saw the eyes that saw him. He saw the feet
moving gently along the bank. He heard the voice, light and translucent,
that only said (he shivered)

I see you.

It was a child’s voice. They were darting eyes that saw everything. They
came from the sky and the dandelions at the same time, these eyes that
belonged to everyone. And he let his breath go to

Fill the void he had left behind him.

Just Outside Your Gated Community

Just Outside Your Gated Community

(“Child, remember that during your lifetime you received good things, whereas Lazarus received terrible things. Now Lazarus is being comforted and you are in great pain.” Luke 16:25b)

It is the worst kind of danger to hear the beggar at the door and
keep on eating your lamb chops and your double chocolate cake, all washed down
with tankards of champagne.
It is the heinous dis-hearing. It is the disheartened ignorance. It is the
fourth story suite that makes the silence complete. You know he is there,
but now you cannot hear his cries of hunger. You can only see the dogs
licking his open wounds while you suck the repast’s grease from your fingers.
You have saturated your blood vessels so completely that
your fine dining will leave you dying within months. A change in menu
might solve
your issues and his.
But you turn the music up louder, the songs from your teens that once
meant everything to you. A forgotten love. An easy day along the sea.
A comrade in arms when you lived on rations and hunted rabbits to
supplement your meager provisions. It was sport for you. You never knew
true hunger.

But he does, just outside your gated community. Didn’t someone tell you
about him?
Did you dismiss him as just another vagrant trying to make a buck without
putting in a single day’s work?

I saw him yesterday, just a block from your home. His eyes were bright,
his gait was labored, his breath was shallow and he winced with every step.
He was relentless. Life and death could happen within the same moment
for him.
I gave him what I had and hoped you would give him more from you
monstrous stores.

The next day I rang at your gate. I hoped to placate the antimony
that had taken the place of your heart. They told me you were gone,
your residence was empty, your soul was somewhere below.

I wished no harm to you. But damn it! He did not need to die:
And you could have seen to that.
But damn it! You did not need to die, and he could have helped
with that.

Live awhile in the flames of your choices. He is comforted as never before.
One day the kingdom may redraw the designs we think prove that we
have it all.

Stand outside your gate before it is too late. Learn his name. The one he
has now. Not the one before he had a face.
Listen to his story. You may both find your thirst quenched
this side of death.

The Day Started Well Enough

The Day Started Well Enough

(“No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You aren’t able to serve God and Mammon.” Luke 16:13)

The day started well enough; the sun rose
in the usual place. The grass was unruly around
the dog’s pen and
the garden beds where two rose bushes struggle.
I would have waited all day for your company,
even if you got a late start. With a porch swing in front
and a deck on the back,
my house is yours. No need to build another one.
There is music even before you arrive,
you send it ahead of you. There are memories
of the way your eyes dance at birds and clouds,
but mostly babies.
There are evenings with campfires
that should never be extinguished.
There are places where no words need be spoken.
The day starts the same for you and me,
and I know you desire for it to end more quietly.
We can pick up the sunshine with plastic shovels
and store it in pails we sometimes used for Easter baskets.
We can toss it toward night-sky imaginations and laugh
at our ingenuity. We have lassoed the sun.
Eden was a paradise I am told,
but so is my back yard. And no tree is forbidden;
the rabbits come for breakfast, the deer brunch on the
unprotected roses.

These are all yours. They do not belong to me.
I’ve kept a journal in the desk by the front window.
You can write in it every time you come, and no one will know.

The day started. They all do. We remembered; we knew.
We wondered when the boy would come finish mowing the lawn.
Then we would gather the sunlight, drop it like jewels into the
glowing embers of our campfire, and tell stories we only tell
each other. 

What The Hoopla was About

What The Hoopla was About

(“Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.” Luke 15:20b)

It was completely unexpected. Servants scurried to buy balloons
and helium tanks. Chefs stewed, smoked, and roasted all the stores
on the farm.
The musicians were lined up, setting their equipment on a flat-bed truck,
still uncertain what the hoopla was all about.

The father’s eyes drooped as days went on. His tears dropped like
rain on the dust around his sandals. He worked his horses hard.
He carried both a burden and diamond of reflections he knew were
brighter than the weeks he had endured. When a son leaves a father,
the rooms are silent; there are gaps in the stories around the dinner table.

The father was not angry. But a son was lost, a boy was dead, and
would found and alive fix anything at all?

He measured his gaze from the porch to the end of the field. He took
the place of a sentry in the warming morning leading till noon. Was their
a dust trail on the horizon? Was there a voice that would make his heart
spin again? When you love deeply you lose nothing though your son has
moved outside the circumference of time. Love is held in reserve,
or how shall the party be ready if all we do is forget?

A certain day, it is difficult to know it precisely, there came a shadow
up the road. There came a boy with shoulders hunched over. There came a
son
who did not think he should be a son. There came a boy who thought
he should be a slave.

Fathers know none of that nonsense. Mothers bake bread every day in hopes
the runaway will show up, sneaking in the screen door from the back porch.

This is love, this sprinting embrace. This is love, this kissing of the face.
This is love, this father, son, son, mother, though not all enjoyed the party.
This is love that surrenders

To foolish shenanigans and brings the children home.

I Want to Lay Down Pretense

I Want to Lay Down Pretense

(“And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:27)

I want to lay down pretense,
I want to carry nothing with me but the way
truth and love chase the shadows away.
I want to be the old man on the porch who
children come to see. I want to hear about the
new baby, the goal they made in soccer, their first crush,
their questions about leaves in the wind and branches that
break overnight next to their window.
I am too full of stories. I am I too many. I am lately
a receiver with no need to broadcast
what I have heard,
what I have learned,
what I think are the deepest concerns an
old man
should have.

I want to lay down attraction,
I want to exist like clouds pregnant with shade.
I want to listen to silence and let it be the only
healing I need.
I want to be the old man with his dog
who stops to speak to a woman bent with age,
clutching her cane,
carrying shopping bags that pull her closer to
the ground. I want to touch her sun-painted arm
spotted like bark and say something that makes her
feel lighter.

I do not want to fight for attention.

I want to be the white-haired man whose age is
still to be determined. Though mirrors do not lie (but
they do, those 2-dimensional scoundrels) I want the
humor of a teenager,
the wonder of a toddler,
and a day when, though nothing happens,
I find love is always enough to
fill my heart with one more breezy conversation.

Bound By No Passage of Time

Bound By No Passage of Time

(“It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the sky nested in its branches.” Luke 13:19)

Borne by diagonal blues
my heart often refuses the comfort of
sun or memories.
I do not delight in inner images,
mere ghosts cannot sit beside me in the afternoon.
I never know if it is chemicals, or misfiring synapses,
or base ungratefulness,
but the pressure pushes tears out past my cheeks again.

To believe the world is absurd at only
a third of your lifespan may be center ring
and second act clowning.
But in the final third it leaves the robin’s song
unheard until they rest for the nested night.

There are words I once knew like soul/breath,
multiple choice answers, true/false tests, clarity.
But I could not discount the unrest,
the whirlpools that unseated the certainties
of invisible habitations. There was no architecture
designed for my peace of mind.

But if you fall, if you are buried by time
bone by bone,
I will find the color yellow and focus toward you
until you bloom again.
I will sit, the saddened, and rehearse the stories we
only tell
until it is too late.
Or the stories we tell family they have heard dozens
of times before,
but coyly confess to never knowing.

But my muscles still strangle me like missing a trapeze
high above the circus tent. My memories sometimes displace
the shoveled dirt but
more often invade my dreams with caricatures, with
mongrels of my own making who have forgotten everything
about dew-cooled meadows midsummer.

I admit there should be more pastels here, portraits that
should have reminded me of your face. But I stub my toe
on sand,
trip myself again and again.
Though I still wave hello to the past,
I will flag down the next possible invitation
to a comfortable couch,
ice cold beer
and a room where the robins,
the rabbits,
the tie-dye shirts and
jangly bracelets
inhabit a house bound by no
passage of time at all.