Poetry

An easy road you wanted, not this dusty, sandalled wilderness where the skin of your hands darkens to leather, your heart to a hardened wineskin with nothing left to drink. Anointing and Spirit, you once walked together in halcyon days where your feet were bathed in cream and oil flowed from the rocks. Now, a squeezing...

In rocksand you have learned to bloom, your petals like tongues collecting morning dew. Learn from the way it settles anew every dawn: mercy is like that, and kindness. You can be too. Refresh others and be refreshed, in that order. This desert, once intolerable, will release her hidden springs...

Pilgrims of light, we journey to a better country whose cities beat gold into bowls and earrings for our inheritance. Whose hills drip with copper and silver, the precious metals we ourselves become through fire. He alone knows the way you take and, I’m telling you, you’re coming forth as gold...

When you rise it is first an ocean pressure bearing down, pulling at the ankle, wrestling the hip. Yield! you say, until the oxygen in your lungs lifts you through this underwater atmosphere up, up to white, up to light. Where breakthrough has bodily sound and peace is the current that carries you, tender, stronger...

Says the Lord, Now will I be exalted in your midst. Do I not already, rise mist-crowned at the dawning? My sun-righteousness takes flight, healing on the wing. Why all this commotion, the chariots and their riders? Because when I rise, you rise, and the Spirit quickens. Sickness, be gone! And sorrow, away with you...

This fluid state I’m in could be ocean or amnion: semi-permeable, I flow through membrane, breathing liquid as easily as oxygen. What is it for, to be born of Spirit and water, if not a baptism that entirely dissolves me in you. I cannot explain, but I will be born anew...