What if God were just twice as smart as you? Twice as nice. Twice as precise. Would you worry then, Darling?
Worry about the things He would tell you
Before, not after, the flood
The possibility of both
Righteous anger and a casual
Ordinary
Blast of glory
Refuting all the
niggling details of narcissism
And all your little monsters
Eyeing you hungrily from their corners
Waiting to take all
The clues, the love-notes, the blazing stars
He has strewn about this place
Only hope for
Ransom.
The argument was about space-time manipulation. Wouldn’t he be able to fix them immediately? Couldn’t he move things instantly, not just travel between times? I like to think of you, in the room with the baby girl, talking in words only children can understand
About how lonely and strange the world might be
Without a best friend/just/like/you
First of all, let me reiterate that I do not expect you two to go the distance–not that prophetic considering where you are today and the inauspicious nature of this ceremony of disaster.
Most weddings are full of shi…..ps, little paper boats people fold along seams, scribble on, and push out onto whatever river they believe in. They write platitudes for the pain, use costly words all wrong.
Then the little boats float off
Leaving you there at the altar, no more substantial than cake topper avatars
Not ready for this:
Loves fierce resolve
To begin and end/end and begin
Together.
I ask the children who would win
In a foot race
Einstein or Newton?
S. says the wearing of wigs would matter
And I picture Newton trotting gamely behind
Losing precious seconds
As he tries to keep the wig on.
Gravity is something you might believe in
Or streams of consciousness
But not Jesus, my subjective friend
Whose fury you have misjudged
Like the smallest of figures in the distance
Moving inexorably toward you
Fire in his eyes
–Revelation 19
Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
I have sometimes heard
The voice of God
remarkably salty
And full of fire
He is both
Placable and implacable in His anger
The first with sullen men
Then unsparing with his only Son
No siblings without the unendurable
No blind and lame set free
Without his blood for me
1 Corinthians 13:1 NIV
[1] If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I were to write a book of fiction for my children I would construct people for them, community, a family, let’s say, a big, sprawling, messy family
Maybe they would live next to some kind of river
Maybe the dogs would talk or the fish would taste like brightly colored jello confections.
Or maybe these fictional people, these purely hypothetical people, would just be back up
The silhouetted figures you might see on the crest of the hill above the sycamore tree as the sun sets
After the dam breaks
When they-you-we
Might need the vigilant ones
The most.
Years ago a man who fought fire told me that the hot center of it is black, vortex dark, a hole you could fall into and never stop
Falling
There is no fire without burning, I tell the children, each sun a metaphor for something
Something bigger than us
Something bigger than them
Than all the worlds of burning
Light reaching back to us
Saying something
Maybe in Morse code
Flashlit messages exchanged through neighboring windows by children in the night
You are…eternal
2 Samuel 5:24 KJV
[24] And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then shall the Lord go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines.
I will leave you to imagine a woman who slakes her insomnia with Sarah arranging flowers around her beloved Daisy, each a sign of constancy, piety, love
While God speaks
Says such specific things
Who knew each tree before it
Was anything but
An inkling in the palm of his hand
Luis, I once lived in a country where the money I earned was worthless outside the country but could buy beautiful, irreplaceable things inside the country. I had a gigantic blue suitcase, a backpack. I took treasure home, but not enough. I should have emptied my bags of all the replaceable things and brought home treasure.
You are home treasure
You are Home, Treasure.
Carrying Light 