There is never enough distance

Between the sun’s setting and its rising

For my soul to see its own light

Through the acts of compromising

That it comes upon in the heat of the battle

Of our separate journeys shining

In their glory

In their wakings

In their day.

 

What can I say of the struggle

Or the conflict that life seems to be?

How can I move to the center

From the edges

Where I seek to be free?

When will I find what is comfort

In the experience of solitary?

Where just being becomes

Both to play and to pray.

 

Like the angels and the animals

And the children and the saints;

They move quickly past the suffering

And the list of their complaints

That the thinking man and his troubled history

For himself and his neighbor paints

Because he believes the place where he is

Is his to stay.

 

Forgetting the will of the Father

That keeps all that is good for our use;

Intending to employ what is ignorance

As the basis of his excuse;

Not caring that in his persistence

He is hell bent by his choice of abuse

Instead of the meek and the humble

And the spiritual way.

 

That the God-man, the Savior, the Christ, the Ideal

Did purport to put forward

Both with love and with zeal

That the poor he might lift up

And the sick he might heal

If only they could hear

What He had to say.

 

In the dark and in the quiet

In the isolation of each heart

Where the prize is the intention

And the end is just the start

Where the distance from each other

Never leaves anyone apart

Despite no light, too much suffering

And umbrae.

2012.10.03.0900 ©