I was unlovely.
I peered my head
Into darkness
To belt flamboyant words
Into wretched caverns that
Handed me back my empty eloquence
In nothing but echoes.
But my voice was a balm
To a heart that pounded, "For me, for me, for me"
Once, I gushed graceful rhetoric.
I stirred paint the color of fire engines
And smeared flamboyant lies over the eyes of my brother
And my sister
I blinded them with poems
I wrote to a God
I did not understand.
But God
Who is rich in love
Was pleased to pry my fingers
From a brush the color of fire engines
He hushed the violent graffiti I smeared on priceless walls
On people's hearts.
He called my name
And I heard the sound
With ears that once
Knew nothing
But a ruthless timpani pounding,
"For me, for me, for me."
Because God
Who is full of mercy
Saw stone
In this chest
And though I heaved breath
I was drowning for the weight of its despotism.
He seized it
and with a love I had never known
He broke my heart.
I still hear the sound of its mighty crumbling
When I look up from cold wastelands
And the skies are streaked
With evening fire
They shout silent testimonies
Of a King that turns the heart of man
Like water in his palm
Who can turn stone to flesh
Like water in his palm
Who can turn stone to flesh
And pierce the fiercest darkness
With healing light.
For God
Who is slow to anger
Saw me broken
And though I cursed the light that found me
He waited like songbirds wait for daylight
And when I ran out of breath
He filled my aching chest with a new song.
And when I ran out of breath
He filled my aching chest with a new song.
There were no violins or fireworks.
It was the song of cold, cold water
That has escaped the tyranny of winter
And laughs quietly as it rushes forth
Slowly, surely
From decaying ice
Into sunshine.
Into sunshine.
It was the radical sound of silence
To a man born in warfare.
And my heart, at last, is silent within me
He has stilled the cacophony of my flesh.
Still
There are dark caverns
And the shadows of death peer over me.
But now
In my heart of flesh
I carry a song
It is quiet
But steady, like a body of the greatest water.
And my eyes
Which once found rest
In violent graffiti
And heavy darkness
And heavy darkness
Have found a covenant
A resting place
On the face of a Man
Who loved the unlovely
So that a righteous God
could turn upon me
And find a blameless child
To call his own.
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| "For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." - John 3.16 |
