Your voice
Like whispers and thunder
Your lightning strikes
More than once
The same place in my heart
Over and over
I wonder
How much I can take?
I wonder
How much closer I can get ?
I’d rather die, because I’ve seen Your face
Than die in the desert, because I was afraid of the fire
I wonder…
Like whispers and thunder
Your lightning strikes
More than once
The same place in my heart
Over and over
I wonder
How much I can take?
I wonder
How much closer I can get ?
I’d rather die, because I’ve seen Your face
Than die in the desert, because I was afraid of the fire
I wonder…
testing
ReplyDeleteI followed your link here from Ryan's blog.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to write a comment on a poem so intimate. The voice in the poem reminds me of Teresa of Avila and Simone Weil and of John Donne - batter my heart.
I spend so much time in the desert that I pause on that line in your poem. I pause to think about the meanings of the word, "desert." And then I work my way back through the poem.
The title of my own blog is a metaphor for the desert that I learned from Mary Austin - Land of Lost Borders. In your poem the use of the metaphor desert, for a place away from God, I think, or perhaps the place to start towards God, evokes so many associations in my mind with in the literature of the West and with the landscape in southern California that it slows me down and makes me pause - and then I remember how much the soft sand in a desert wash slows me down when hiking. I remember Simone Weil living in a desert of disbelief, living outside of the church because she believed it was God's will for her to be there with the others. I remember the monks who go to the desert to see the face of God, or to more acutely know the meaning of the absence of God, of exile, of wandering, of wondering.
That place in one's heart, where the lightning strikes - I know the place. It is the place where one feels most afflicted, where one knows the feeling of the love of God.
Wow Ken, I think your comment is poetry :)
ReplyDeleteSo much so, I'm going to ponder on it and write a response in the next 48 hrs :)