eight::nine

You can't tell anyone anything
without them telling you something else.
It may not be that no one listens or hears,

yet how often does anyone?

With empty an stomach

who has an ear

but the one trained by fasting?

We're training--

without conscious knowledge

--quickly to run out of food,

to dry up all our waters,

and then will it be a choice to fast?

We'll still bitch and moan

and really have nothing to say,

the water flowing from the rock

wasn't enough to bid us silent.

Oh, we might even say the right words,

confess the correct creed,

listened at some point to a sound revelation,

but at the change of the breeze

everything is wrong.

The wrong song and poem and direction.

The beautiful temptation to walk away

from the self-giving love we were called by,

that easy stroll that leaves us in paralysis,

even though moving we are numb,

the further we travel the more deaf.

"Blessed are you

for great things have been revealed to you!"

This was not sarcasm,

yet our flesh can't tell the difference,

or rather makes irony out of things straight-forward.

Has this been worthwhile,

this thinking and grasping,

praying for a good word,

a truthful expression?

I want love to be in my thoughts

and on the tips and palms of my hands,

permeating the recesses of my spirit,

else all this is vain.

Might it still be vain--

am I one in the grumbling desert crowd,

or have some of us escaped its murmur?

Soon I will learn upon Peter's turn of the key,

the day we go to sleep beside the sea

on the hill with stationed cross.

(Numbers 20:1-13, Psalm 95, Matthew 16:13-23)