Who put me in your hands?
Was it you?
Truth speaks like a fire,
But when did I lose sight
Of all the stars in your palms
And the galaxies under your fingernails?
Your face unveils
The light of nebulae,
Glowing like a firefly
With all the fire of a thousand thousand suns.
You are the one
Holding my breath til I can't see
Anything but you. For you are life
And love and lord and every word
Ever written and spoken and read
In every tongue, ever said,
Fails to stand alone or together in a million variations
Before the silence of you.
This silence, like a mist rising above a lake at night
Before a storm, collects slowly on the fine blonde hairs of my arm.
But when the storm comes
And the thunder drums
The rain bursts forth with all the force of a waterfall.
I can't watch--at all.
For your silence becomes the sound of every living blade of grass and ant and tree and rock and root and
Moon throwing its head back into the night silence and shattering all eardrums.
Deafening, roaring, pouring out like lava comes the collective shout of bottled up praise the world must raise
Because I am not speaking.
I was told to be silent.
My day to day life scorned my words
And my looks and my overabundant joy
And rebuked me.
But you--you're the life in a pine needle
And the rotation of planets
And that sort of majesty
Took me in its hand and breathed my breath into my lungs
And filled my eyes with delight.
So
In light of this silence of mine in the face of you,
The world threw back its head and let out what was bottled up.
Enough.
My hands are full of nothing
And yours are full of me
Doing nothing but examining your fingerprints.
If I throw my head back and laugh and shout I am a fool,
And the world shakes its head and sighs for people like myself.
But I will not submit to chains or cold rains when silence reigns.
I am changed
And alive and on fire
And the mire is gone.
I leap from grace to grace
In the light of your face and the shadow of your wings.
I WILL sing.
postscript
NaPo day 20! Breaking out of a very structured 15 days to something without a lot of structure. Phew! An attempt to emulate spoken word, where the emphasis is on the spoken sound rather than the read. But this will do. Based on the Psalms and Christ's statement about the "rocks crying out."