Not me:
at those harps
sporting a stylish halo
walking on cotton ball clouds.
Not me beyond conflict,
Receiving everything I want
even before I ask for it:
Not in my heaven.
I used to only know what it wasn’t.
But the gift
of the last
few weeks
has been a taste of what it will be.
I was nearly wrung dry:
I hope you will permit me to torture that metaphor
and clarify:
the towel
of my soul
was just
barely
damp.
In moments of peace
there was solace
in the fact
that I’d done some good.
But I needed peace
to find that peace,
a thorny dilemna.
And then there was the ocean
not waiting for me
except that it was
waiting for me.
What deep hidden part of us
does the white noise-rhythm of the waves
awaken? Why does the salt
carried on the breeze
remind me who I am?
And in the middle
of the rest and the peace
we held a war council
to recover one of our own:
But even this brings a deeper peace
than the surface battles we fight:
I am reminded of who is by my side.
And the capping moment
that next time
A legacy reawakened
through its own force of will?
How could you know
that my own grandmother
stored up her change
for me way back then?
A handful of metal and lint and miscelania…
through the bank’s alchemy metamorphed…
and then changed again:
Whatever I wanted,
stuff simultaneously
worthless and priceless…
And so my heart tells me it will be like this
In the Great Then:
Rest and battle, trials and the continuance of all the good things…
But there is something more!
I will not play a harp but I will hear it
maybe we will hear it
maybe this is the Great Difference:
Our acts, all of them, will be the
voices, the strings, the harmony.
It turns out there is a truth hiding in that simple-scary vision of Heaven
We will hear it in some new way:
Earthly music will turn out to be only a castrated echo
of this thing our actions themselves will proclaim:
