Skip to main content

The Light

The Light

Take back the light--
now or tomorrow, or in June;
it has grown dim, blunted
by compromise.

It is too frail to set
the heart on fire, to sing,
to praise, to fight Goliath
--to battle the dark.

Take home the light
and hold it in your palm.
Breathe on it, it will grow strong again
and full of love.

Let it be born again, that light:
inside a tree, a stone, a dog!
It will be holy once again
when it's no longer me.

All things return; the molecules
that make this moment,
and the cells that make this bone.
Merciful One, take back the light.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're okay!!

We're okay, we say, we're well; zooming to see friends, it's great,  we're smiling, waving, smiling.  Smiling. And all around our elders trapped in airless rooms with only one way out: in body bags. Curbside the freezer trucks are waiting. Remember what it's like to hug,  to kiss, to be so close we dreamt each other's dreams? Will we remember--if we live? And will the woods be green again this spring? Will God forgive us our sins?
Post a Comment
Read more

Teshuvah

  Photo Sasha Freemind on unsplash “Repentance,” like most words that have come into the English language from Latin, is thin on emotion, feeling. There is something cerebral about it that does not capture the sorrow, the regretting, the regressing to the fervored childlike promises of I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. But lashuv , to go back, means not only ”to regret,” it also means “to return.” This translation captures the hope that going back is always possible: going back to a pre-lapsarian world in which our wrongdoings are gone, in which we have not yet missed the mark ( cheit , the word for sin, being an archery term), in which broken relationships are healed without leaving scars, in which we ourselves are innocent again, having said No to the apple and the knowledge of good and evil. Yet somehow the notion of returning implies a place or a state of being to which we can return, as we move from the here and now to the there and then. But can we? How do I return when I a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Something About Spring

There's something about spring.... Trees and shrubs madly competing to get all their leaves out first, big, fat, lush; grass turning too green, then being outdone by the too-yellow of a carpet of dandelion; tulips burning up the near-empty garden beds with hues of deep purple and barnfire reds. It's all somehow too much. And people, too, popping out of their sealed houses, shivering in thin shirts and sandals with grim determination, trying to ignore the hard spring breeze. In all that rushing towards new life, that frenzy seemingly shared by all living things, with the swallows repairing last year's nests, and the Canada Geese squatting in the middle of the hayfield, or even by the side of the road to get the new crop of children out ... in all that there is also denial, a forgetting of what fails to return, what has quietly ceased during autumn and winter: plants that went underground and have failed to rise again, animals whose last breath rode away on the stiff winds of...
Post a Comment
Read more