This empty cup

This empty cup                                                                                        

Enough for me, this empty cup. 

With Your own lips

You have drained it of the world’s wine

and left a promise –

the distant scent and stain of Your own wine.

Each day I enfold my hands

around its rough clay and murmur a prayer,

lift to my lips its soured nothingness

to taste the exasperatingly faint

intimation of Your nothingness.

And setting it down, abandon again

the world’s shimmering images,

imaginings and intoxications,

its brief, bitter sweetness.

For me, enough (is enough) this empty cup,

until its clay mouth is crushed again,

its hollowness filled with debris,

buried in the earth’s whirling wheel 

for yet another stab at Your ethereal lightness,

assured Oneness, Your sobering, holy wine.

O child of God, the world is mad with drink.

Rejoice in your disaffected indifference. 

(drawing by Rick Panico)