I Cannot Keep Awake

“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life,
and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.
For that day will assault everyone
who lives on the face of the earth.
Be vigilant at all times
and pray that you have the strength
to escape the tribulations that are imminent
and to stand before the Son of Man.”
—Luke 21:25-28, 34-36

My eyes will not stay open;
I cannot keep awake,
but trust what you have spoken
that swiftly comes the day

when you will come restoring,
come bringing exiles home.
I may not be here for it,
but I wait, even so.

The memories we carry,
old sorrows we still weep
like seeds the winter buried,
not dead but fast asleep,

with Jesse's stump forgotten
yet watered by the dew—
all that we lost shall blossom,
becoming something new.

The fruit we stole in Eden
and Cain's rejected sheaves,
their shoots will grow like weeds then
into your mercy's feast.

And if I cannot see it,
if I am buried deep,
yet you will come, Redeemer,
to wake me from my sleep.

Detail of Jesse from the Stained Glass window of All Saints Church, Hove, Sussex. England, Photo By Malcolmlow, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64575403

Mantle

To those who stand on corners
or walk the highways out,
to those who sleep in doorways,
reach out your mantle now
and drape it as a shelter
across the unkind earth,
a tent of finest velvet
for those who sleep on dirt.

Reach out to them, O Mary
apparelled in the sun,
the hounded and the harried,
and hide them from the guns.
See those in need of rescue
and spread for them your cloak
to be a sky-blue refuge
that screens them from the foe.

O Mother, now behold them,
the weary and the poor,
and in your arms enfold them 
where once you held the Lord,
to shield them from the Herods—
O, bear them safe away
beyond the reach of terror
to live another day.

The Ravensburger Schutzmantelmadonna, c. 1480, attributed to Michel Erhart, painted limewood, Bode Museum, Berlin. Attributed to Michel Erhart – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2293730

Broken World

Riffing on Psalm 46:

The waters rage and riot;
their rampage fills the sky,
and all we know of quiet
is but the cyclone's eye.
The mountains quake in terror—
then how shall we not fear?
Our broken world's repairer,
why do you not draw near?

And if we have offended,
done evil in your sight,
oh, can it not be mended?
Can nothing be put right?
Remember, Lord, the deluge,
your promise to all things:
Come make for us a refuge
beneath your outspread wings.

Come fill our thirst and hunger;
lift up the lost and poor,
then work a greater wonder
and still the rage of war.
Our strength and our salvation,
our rescue in distress,
though mountain fall and nation,
draw near, draw near to us.

Thunderstorm near Pritzerbe (Germany) By Mathias Krumbholz – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26118676SONY DSC

The Dying and the Dead

O Son of Heaven, only lord of life,
I offer you the dying and the dead:
the man who turns from burying his wife
to hear his doctor say the cancer's spread,
the children falling silently to earth
in cracks and crevices of toppled stone,
the mother who will not survive the birth,
the young man once more eating all alone.
Take them, O Lord, in venerable hands—
the labor of our hands, the bent world's fruit—
take all the grief and death, O Sorrow's Man:
“This is my body given up for you.”
For we all bow our heads and feast on dust;
we all will drink the cup of bitter tears.
O, take this dented chalice and these crusts
and crawl into each crumb, each drop of fear,
each block of rubble burying the lost,
each cancer cell, each blade that rends the flesh,
each prison wall, each bullet, every cross,
and all the myriad doorways into death:
Imbue them with yourself, O God who bleeds;
take as your skin the many silent roads,
drawn out so every line to your heart leads,
and drown death in your pulse's ebb and flow.
Then we will eat your flesh and drink your blood
in that one meal where all of us take part
until the tide has turned in mercy's flood
and we live on forever in your heart.