Creatures by Whose Grace I Live

How patient you are who read these sentences, allowing me to draw my tiny breath in the chambered vault of your attention.

How sweet you are to forgive my obsessions, seeing past them to the One in whom what is given is given freely and forever and always to all.

How grateful I am for the broom by which the Lord's choir loft is cleaned and prepared for those whose voices are given to the Song.

How happy I am with the tedium of sweeping and with the metaphor by which happiness itself is at last revealed.

When I am finished with my work, I walk a long time through the village, head down so as not to trouble the worthy with my neediness and greed.

At night I bind myself to sacred texts and dream of the creatures by whose grace I  live - bees and chickadees, horses and trout and crows.

When I was young what died made clear it would not come back and so my theology was bitter from the start.

I took my books to the barn and read aloud to the cows who were doomed.

I took my lunch to the enormous quartz rock in the pasture and ate there in quiet awe and what could not be killed but only buried.

When it rained I went into the forest and listened to the rain and the light.

When it snowed I went into the forest and listened to the snow and the dark.

When night fell I carried my dream of prayer into a dangerous bedroom and slept the way one sleeps when their sleep is not their own.

When he raised his fist I pleaded.

When she choked me with bars of soap I begged.

The God of my Ancestors wept for seven years and a thousand fecund turtles were born in the oceanic tears.

A black bear god agreed to be make himself visible at regular intervals.

Trout allowed if I ate them the rainbows that comprised them would not leave me but be filters unto my vision.

Beauty brought forth a new God whose blessing was whatever crappy poem I could manage and whose joy was knowing that no poem in His name was ever crappy.

I stumbled through a long penance into a light I remembered but did not create.

Therefore, when I say "alleluia," I mean alleluia.