On This Shore

Love

Reaches to this shore:

This partial place

Where broken monuments to stone-dead hopes

Stand in the rubble,

Foolishly restored

By men with solemn ribbons on their chains.

We, who have glimpsed,

Or dreamt,

A better light,

Flailing our way through scrambled pilgrimage,

With stone-grazed hands and shins,

Stubbed toes,

And count our wounds as worthy;

Give us strength

To travel further, harder,

To do more,

And to be unafraid of sitting still

Under the willows, where the old lyres hang,

Mourning our exile,

Mourning our own kind,

Waiting until the morning of Love’s lovely dawn,

Claiming the promised land here in the dark.

May all our tears be rain.

Learning Lament

We cannot speak the language of faith,

From the deepest place, the heart and the root of our being,

Till we learn the language of lament,

The language of our broken, needy world.

Yes, the gift is freely given,

But the road

Is still the path of pilgrimage

The Via Dolorosa,

Pursuing our Lord

And walking after him –

He who already holds us fast.

This is a world of stones –

Stone altars, stoning, stony wilderness,

The stone-hard hearts of men

Who only give

Hard stones instead of bread.

Down there, down there,

We must take the light,

The light that we have seen,

The Light who is our Love.

There in the dark

Take hold afresh

Of him,

Himself,

Our only anchor place.

Then

Reaching out

To grasp a flailing wrist,

Skeletal, dreadful,

A hand outreaching from the lowest place,

To where we stand on tears,

In tears proclaiming,

God is already here.

How can they know

Unless we walk the darkness by their side?

I have not yet learned to be old ...

I have not yet learned to be old:

My world

Glistens with sky-eyed wonder.

My heart

Still dances under the stars

Tasting moonlight;

While my feet,

Toe tangled in grass,

Wiggle to their own rhythm.

Laugh with me,

Bright leaves of spring,

Chortle the air with birdsong!

Search each storm

For rainbows!

Rest within the shade’s embrace,

Smiling at dandelions.

What is this thing called age?

Dull paint upon the body’s chariot?

An extra blanket in the howling wind?

A sorrow for the things that are no more?

A little pain?

A softness in the heart?

These shall not make me old,

Shall not defeat

My butterfly-skipping hopes,

The prayers that bind,

Fiercer than fierce,

To glories just beyond

My fingers’ reach.

I shall stretch out my sails

With hands that time has cobbled into knots,

To catch the dawn-wind of my Father’s love,

And steer to brave horizons,

Learn new songs,

And, open-handed, face both day and night.