Then Abraham drew nearer and said:
“Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?
Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city;
would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it
for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing,
to make the innocent die with the guilty
so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike!
Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”
The LORD replied,
“If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom,
I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
—Genesis 18:20-32

The fields lie at the mercy of the weather;
the scythes are sharpening to mow us down,
and while the weeds and wheat still grow together,
together to the harvest we are bound.
Our roots entwined, that is our death to sever,
is there no good among us to be found?

Or will you fell the wheat to cull the guilty?
You’re only poorer by a loaf of bread,
and oh, how great the labor so to sift them
and from the sinners pluck the innocent,
in a metropolis to find the fifty
among the thousands bowed to rain and wind.

You see us scurrying along the pavement,
driven by greed or fettered by our fear
or moved by love—your own love’s imitation,
though crudely copied, muddied and unclear.
Look down and find some good in us worth saving
although our springing evils choke us here!

Let your perfection make our reaping perfect:
The guiltless must not suffer for the crimes
of others—let those others have your mercy
if it means that the innocent survive.
Pour down your rain: Both weeds and wheat are thirsting.
Keep us all safe, O God, ‘til harvest time.

Abraham Sees Sodom in Flames, circa 1896–1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (French, 1836-1902) – [1][2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8865438

Old messes stick.  The pot looks clean enough
until you take and tilt it toward the light
and find what soap and water couldn’t slough.

Do it again, and this time, scrub it right—
I tell my sons to wash these ones by hand.
It’s fine to let it soak here overnight,

but morning comes much sooner than you planned
and after that it’s time to cook again.
Get steel wool, scouring powder—hell, get sand—

to scrape away the bits of what had been.
“But those are stains—they won’t come out,” they say,
until I take the washrag, muscle in,

and elbow grease the leftovers away.
For I know, more than they can, how it goes;
I’ve scorched enough to learn it, in my day,

and it’s the one who’s tasted it who knows:
If I don’t deal with these old messes now,
everything else just sticks to them.  It grows.

You let it go, but then there comes an hour,
a ruined meal—it’s time to get it done.
Roll up your sleeves at last and start to scour.

These grimy little battles that I’ve won
against myself: This is the grit of love,
and you will taste it someday, O my sons.
Here’s the steel wool: Your mess has just begun.

Mankind is but a breath; his flesh is grass
and withers as the flowers of the field.
Though others take his gewgaws—bits of brass,
a broken weapon, or a dented shield—
he moves across the earth as shadows pass
and leaves no lasting mark upon the weald.

At dawn he springs up, growing like a weed
that eats the sun and blossoms into shade.
They lean against each other in their need
and twine as one—strength blooming in a glade—
or bend the weaker downward in their greed,
though each one of the self-same earth was made.

Either the burning sun, the tearing wind,
or sudden fire will wither weak and strong,
or else the worm, secret as hidden sin,
will lay the tallest in the dirt headlong.
No one escapes: All that have ever been
are no more now; all that are will be gone.

So such a vine, one morning, sprang and grew.
The early sun had not begun to burn
ere it was finished, tall and broad by noon,
and toward the searing face its leaves it turned
so smaller things could shelter where it stood
to look down on a city, walled and stern.

One hundred twenty thousand living souls
and all their kit and cattle, dogs and cats,
they swelter there, on stones as hot as coals,
but take no sip, nor let the livestock lap.
They sit while thirst and hunger take their tolls,
weeping in prayer, in sackcloth and in ash.

But one man in the shadow of the leaves
looks down and waits to see the streets in flames,
as once this people waited through a siege
to see his homeland weakened into shame.
Let justice fall on murderers and thieves;
they’ll feel at last the yoke and weight of blame.

He watches, but that day it does not come:
No flood of wrath and fire the city drowns.
But still he joys to know it comes for them,
takes comfort in the shade that he has found,
at nightfall lays himself beside the stem—
At dawn he finds it withered on the ground:

“You brought me from the darkness of the grave;
you saved me when they threw me in the brine,
and when your light, O God, had made me faint
you saved me with the shadow of this vine.
I kept my word, and all my vows I paid:
Why have you taken what I loved as mine?”

By noon a flaming sun, a melting heat
are pelting him—him only—on his perch.
The city walls lay shadows at their feet:
Its people cling there, singing out a dirge.
Maybe their song will reach the judgment seat;
maybe this God will yet his wrath avert.

But he alone who watches from the height,
he only does not pray to live more days.
His one last comfort fallen in the night,
he prays for death to end the desert’s blaze.
Now comes a voice he knows: “And is it right
for such a brief life so to stir your rage?”

“I’ve every right,” he answers, “to my wrath.
You’ll kill a vine to put me in my place
and let the city flourish that has dashed 
our infants on the rocks. You call it grace?
Now, only now, you turn them from their path.
Where is your justice on a murderous race?”

“You neither planted,” answers God, “nor sowed.
It cost you nothing, took none of your might,
nor could you, of yourself, have made it so.
You loved what flourished as the grass and died.
I made these hundred twenty thousand souls:
Shall I not love them? Is that not my right?”

So all his travail merely comes to this:
The same old mercy he has always known.
A storm at sea, three days dead in a fish,
a city that will not be overthrown:
This, this is why he fled first to Tarshish.
And Jonah turns away and heads for home.

Late Roman, Asia Minor, early Christian period, 3rd century – Jonah Under the Gourd Vine – 1965.239 – Cleveland Museum of Art.tif Photo By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65798975

Have I come at last to trust you?
Lord, forgive my long delay.
It’s your patience that has done this,
if I’ve found the homeward way.

Now it’s brought me to the shoreline—
What is this you have for me?
For the path I’d learned to follow
disappears into the sea.

Must I walk into its waters?
They have vanished in its roar,
all your foregone sons and daughters
crossing over to your shore.

Are they lost? Will I be lost, then?
Do you hold them even yet?
Lord, will even my poor flotsam
make its way into your net?

If the waters part before me
or the breakers overwhelm,
still you’ve made a mansion for me
on dry land or in the swells;

then I must embrace the wave, here—
turquoise, azure, midnight blue,
deep and deeper still, my savior,
as you draw me near to you.

Limosa fedoa is walking at Ocean Beach at low tide against the sun. By Brocken Inaglory – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12079178

No sparrow falls but you have traced its arc
and marked the place where it will come to earth.
The arrow or the talons of the hawk
or winter winds lay sparrows in the dirt;
let summer linger, then, and raptors balk.
Bring down all things that would the sparrows hurt:

Break every bow, make every arrow warp
to curve its flight away from fragile wings
that fly to find some hollow in the scarp
where they can hide from javelins and slings.
Bend every sword to plow the furrows sharp
and straight to foster green and growing things.

Then we shall, as the sparrows, come to rest
where nothing keeps the corn from growing tall.
No boots shall trample fields from east to west;
no airstrikes shatter glass and topple walls;
no bombs shall shake the branches where we nest;
no gun shall fire, nor any sparrow fall.

Until that day, keep every bird that flies,
each lamb that frisks, each man that walks his way
on any road, forever in your eyes:
Do not, O Heaven, ever look away.
And if he falls, be strength for him to rise,
or on your shoulders bear him into day. Amen.

Male house sparrow in Germany By Thorsten Denhard – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33124111

Creation groans: The aftershocks
make even mountains quake.
The earth upon its pillars rocks
and our foundations shake.

Is this the hour—or no, not yet?—
long set for your return
to count our doom, collect our debt,
and make the rivers burn?

For all the earth dissolves in fire
when you come back to us.
Tornadoes in a falcon gyre
breathe life into the dust.

But all that terrifies our hearts
you draw into yourself:
The door where everyone departs
lies buried in your flesh.

You entered earth’s futility;
you took it as your own,
born into our fragility:
our blood, our breath, our bone.

And though we are a breath—no more—
we need not fear the night.
You lead us through the open door
into your endless light.

An example of the lava arcs formed during Strombolian activity. This image is of Stromboli itself. Photo By Wolfgangbeyer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34243

For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom,
it would have remained until this day.
But I tell you, it will be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.
—Matthew 11:20-24

As man is only born of woman’s sorrow
and flourishes and withers as the grass,
he lives today who may not see tomorrow
and only knows for sure that he will pass,
so fallow fields cannot escape the harrow:
They will be torn before the seeds are cast.

Yet we are seeds as well, these wounds our homeland;
we blossom here and call the ground redeemed.
Though labor’s days are long, we say they’re worth it
if from the weeds some grains of wheat are gleaned.
Ten innocents in Sodom and Gomorrah,
and we’d have blessed their generous regime.

What of the seeds that fall and never blossom?
What of the thorns that haunt these fertile fields?
The swooping birds too soon devour the harvest
and nothing grows, no matter how we’re tilled.
What of the cold winds of an early autumn?
What of the chill that blights the hoped-for yield?

If there were but somewhere a lasting springtime,
eternal summer reaching back to fall
and filling even winter with its green time,
enlivening the dead things in the soil,
a place where even Sodom in its sweet time
before the flames would heed a different call.

There is a place outside all spinning spaces,
a moment outside moments’ forward thrust,
and there the face whose image fills all faces
has wed his son to place and moment’s dust.
This one has come, is come, will come to save us,
preserve us even after we are crushed.

Eternity outside of wind and weather,
you see our rising and our falling here;
you who have bound yourself into our tether,
can you not save the fallen we hold dear?
But as we fall, you fall with us together:
O broken as we break, be ever near!

Reach back as you are ever reaching forward.
These harrowed fields: Let them with new life swell.
Let the seeds grow for fifty peaceful souls there;
let it be words of joy your angels tell.
Let mercy come to Sodom and Gomorrah,
and harrow us forever out of hell.

One for today’s readings on Moses telling the people exactly where God’s command is, and Jesus telling the people exactly what God’s command is, and the Good Samaritan:

I took the road to Jericho:
It’s you that I was looking for.
To find my God, how far I’d go,
but fallen, I can go no more.

I sought you, Lord, upon the heights
and far across the desert ground,
now these cracked ribs can’t raise a cry;
these swollen lips cannot call out.

But what I cannot say, you’ve heard;
though no one looks at me, you do.
To you my silence is a word;
my darkness is as light to you.

Though here beside the road I lie
as dust for all to tread upon,
pour out on me the oil and wine
until I overflow with balm.

For you have never dwelt apart,
O word of God forever near:
I find you in my wounded heart,
for you were here, were always here.

I had to take a winding track
to find you in the world I know.
Now lift me up and take me back
home from the road to Jericho.

The good Samaritan, after Delacroix by Van Gogh, 1890, Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.

I pray for peace as wars run into years.
There is a kingdom somehow drawing near
where nothing dies, not even a leaf falls
except as medicine. There are no palls
for there are never funerals, never grief.
Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief—

Are those my lips that say it, and my mouth?
Go through the motions—it’s not even doubt;
it’s nothing, empty as the words I say
and mean—and know the wind will blow away.
A moment, and the words and I are gone.
What will remain? What grace will carry on?

The terrible, the unrelenting thirst
for brother’s blood we spill as at the first—
but even this is swallowed in the vast
unfathomable peace that comes at last.
I cannot grasp it, cannot comprehend
the ocean without shoreline, without end.

It has no hunger, neither has it need;
it swallows all, and yet it does not feed.
It takes our death, and then the dead thing lives.
The Lord taketh away—but, too, he gives
who knows the roots of death, makes them his own
and lies there silent as the unmoved stone.

This silence lets me speak words that confound.
This, then, is faith: I let myself be bound
by words that go unanswered. This is hope:
That there beyond the confines of my scope
the answer lies, with him, devouring death.
When this is finished, he will give it breath.

Letipea hiidrahn (glacial erratic) in Estonia By Zosma – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10887879