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 vintage.

Each day I enfold its rough clay

 

and murmur a prayer,

lift to my lips its soured nothingness,

 

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.