Even So

I struggle with sadness (with good reason). The world is a dark place. Sometimes I will construct bits of words to hold off the sadness, things that are true but cannot fly or sing or curl up in one’s hands. We make words alive all the time–alive to life or alive to death, but not everyone can use words to make the dead rise or the sun, to speak worlds into being.

I know only One who can do that. Word of God, speak us all to life.

Noise Travels Hundreds of Miles Underwater

Despite my refusal to believe in the ghosts of the dead, stalking the yard, watching from the hill, beneath the trees where we have buried them, it remains the souls of the technically still living who haunt the before-and-after story of the man buried for another

never asking what exactly it is a carpenter does with

the disarray of

rails, posts, and sockets from the busted-in gates of hell