My
childhood summers
Another
day marked off on the calendar
as
if it really does have a name and number,
my
life counting down now
in
months and days rather than years.
Death
has always been an abstract to me,
an
absence rather than a occurrence
and
these days I summon up
my
childhood summers
when
time was measured
only
in daylight or darkness
and
I reconstruct as best I can
that
guileless childhood abandon,
moving
untouched through time,
unobservant
of its inexorable passing.
O
child of God, Brian Darnell shall one day die.
You, on the other
hand, will live forever.
Bring
forth the ardor
I
recite a love poem for my Lord –
more
of a plea for love
than
a profession of it –
a
love I hope to one day possess.
He
knows of it already,
before
this thick-tongued,
faint-of-heart
suitor can deliver it.
The
words I choose – in fact, any words at all –
are
not an agency of truth
but
of a wish and a hope and a pledge
to
allow Him as best I might
to
enter every hidden recess of my being,
to
bring forth the ardor dormant there, the depths
of
which I have never had the courage to plumb.
O
child of God, the love you crave (per Meher)
comes from within,
awaiting only its retrieval.
(painting by Mark Hodges)
Waiting
for me
How
patient You are! Waiting for me to
discover
and
uncover my fallacies and misconceptions,
my
inconsistencies and hypocrisies
without
belaboring the point
that
understanding has no meaning.
Waiting
for me to shed my infatuations –
with
myself and others. Ah, indeed!
How
hardy is my foolishness!
And
my mind a galloping steed!
All
these years of Your serenading
and
I have yet to become a rose –
to
flourish and adorn, to acquiesce and allow.
O
child of God, if only you were as enamored of Love
as you are of your persistent,
disputatious inquiries.
The
melody of a flute
Last
night I lay in bed
listening
to my heartbeat.
I
heard the sound of one hand clapping.
Above
my roof, a roll of thunder.
Or
was it my stomach rumbling?
Do
I want to live in the body God gave me,
or
continue to roam
the
phantasmagoric realm of my mind?
My
Lord’s hand upon the pen,
my
every poem emerges
from
His Word and His silence,
a
psalm of praise
from
me to Him
and
from Him to me.
O
child of God, obsessively you wander the wilds,
pursuing the windswept
melody of a flute.
