Three mint leaves torn by my wife’s quiet hand, hot water, green steam — and something in my chest lets go.
*
John, exiled on Patmos, saw it at the very end: a river bright as crystal, a tree on either bank, twelve fruits for twelve moons, and leaves for the healing of the nations.
The garden gate where the flaming sword stood swings open again.
*
After beasts and bowls and Babylon’s fall, the last word for the nations is not ash. It is a leaf.
This week near the French border, a young linden goes into German soil, one of ten peace trees on an avenue planned from Paris to Berlin. Old enemies kneeling at the same root.
*
They will see God’s face.
Moses saw only the back from the cleft of the rock. Here the veil burns away like a moth’s wing in the Friend’s lamp, and no lamp is needed.
*
Twice John bowed at the wrong feet. I take comfort in that. I have bowed wrong more than twice.
*
Do not seal the book. Soon is not a date on a chart. Soon is the Beloved closer than my own breath.
Only the lie stays outside the gate, and the lie has lived in my heart too. But robes can be washed.
*
Seventy-seven years. Forty in the pulpit. Scales I tipped, words I said too roughly, prayers I let thin out, a church I watched divide.
I come to the last page a cracked clay jar by the river. Thirsty. Called anyway.
*
Come, says the Spirit. Come, says the bride. Not the worthy. The thirsty. Maranatha.
*
All Saints on Sunday, the vote just days away, and the last word of the Book is still grace.
Light comes through the mint on the sill. Her hand reaches past me again. The steam rises —
God said to Jacob, “Arise. Go up to Bethel. Live there.
Build an altar to the God who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.”
Bethel. The place of the stone. The place of the dream.
The place where he once slept alone with a stone beneath his head and heaven opened above him.
Years had passed. He had wrestled with God. He had faced his brother. He had carried wounds through distant roads.
And now God called him back to the place where the journey began.
*
Jacob said to his household, “Put away the foreign gods among you.
Purify yourselves. Change your clothes.
Let us arise and go to Bethel.
There I will build an altar to the God who answered me in the day of my trouble and who has been with me wherever I have gone.”
So they gave Jacob their foreign gods and the rings in their ears.
Jacob buried them under the oak near Shechem.
Some things must not be carried into the next chapter. Old gods. Old fears. Old loyalties. Old ways of trusting ourselves instead of God.
They buried them.
*
And they went on. God protected them along the road.
When Jacob arrived at Bethel, he built an altar. He called the place El-Bethel— the God of Bethel.
Not merely the God of the place, but the God who had met him there.
*
Then Deborah died. Rebekah’s nurse. An old woman who had traveled through generations of the family. Jacob buried her beneath the oak. And they called the tree Allon-bacuth— the oak of weeping.
Even on the road toward promise, there are places where we must stop and mourn.
Faith does not mean we do not weep. Sometimes the holy place is also a place of tears.
*
Then God appeared to Jacob again. “Your name is Jacob. But you shall no longer be called Jacob. Your name shall be Israel.”
And God blessed him. “I am God Almighty.
Be fruitful and multiply.
A nation and a company of nations shall come from you.
Kings shall come from your body.
The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac,
I will give to you and to your descendants.”
*
God was repeating the promise.
Not because Jacob had forgotten it, but because human beings need to hear grace again and again.
*
Jacob set up a stone pillar.
He poured out a drink offering and oil upon it.
And he called the place Bethel.
Again.
The name remained.
But Jacob was not the same.
*
Then they journeyed on.
Rachel was giving birth. The labor was hard. The road became a place of pain.
As she struggled, the midwife said, “Do not be afraid. You have another son.”
But Rachel was dying. With her last breath she named him Ben-oni— “son of my sorrow.”
But Jacob called him Benjamin— “son of the right hand.”
A child entered the world through the doorway of death.
Rachel was buried on the road to Ephrath, near Bethlehem.
*
Jacob set up a pillar over her grave.
A stone again.
So many stones along Jacob’s life— stones of dreams, stones of altars, stones of remembrance, stones beside graves.
Perhaps our lives are also marked by such stones.
Places where something ended. Places where something began. Places where we learned that love remains even after death.
*
Rachel was gone. But Benjamin remained. The mother was buried.
The promise continued.
And Jacob walked on.
*
The story does not hide the complexity of his family.
Reuben violated his father’s concubine.
Jacob heard of it.
The family carried its brokenness into the future.
*
And then the sons of Jacob were named—
the children born along the journey, the children through whom a people would come.
*
At last, Jacob returned to his father Isaac at Mamre, near Hebron, the place where Abraham and Isaac had lived.
Isaac died at the age of one hundred eighty.
Esau and Jacob, the two brothers, buried their father together.
*
The story that began with rivalry
ended, for a moment, beside a grave.
Two brothers standing together.
Not young anymore. Not the men they once were. Time had changed them.
*
And perhaps that is one of the quiet miracles of Genesis:
God does not erase the past.
He carries us through it.
Jacob returns to Bethel, but Bethel is no longer the same place.
The stone is there. The altar is there. The memory is there.
But the man who stands before it has been changed by every road, every fear, every wound, every blessing.
He has learned that God is not only the God of beginnings.
God is also the God who walks with us through endings.
The God of birth and death.
The God of laughter and tears.
The God of dreams and graves.
*
The God who calls us back when we have wandered.
And perhaps returning to Bethel does not mean going backward.
Dinah went out to see the daughters of the land. A young woman, curious about the world beyond her tents, looking for friendship, for the ordinary life of a girl among others.
But the world she entered was not gentle.
Shechem, the son of Hamor, saw her. He took her. He violated what should never have been taken. And afterward he said, Let me marry her.
But love cannot be born from possession. Desire cannot make violence holy. A human being is never a thing to be taken.
Jacob heard. His sons heard. Their hearts burned with anger, not only because their sister had been wounded, but because their family had been shamed in the eyes of the land.
Hamor came to speak of marriage, of daughters and sons given and received, of land and wealth binding two peoples. But beneath the language of peace lay the wound no one had faced.
Jacob’s sons answered with deception. Let every man among you be circumcised, and we will become one people. The men of the city agreed.
And on the third day, when their bodies were weak, Simeon and Levi entered the city with swords. They killed Hamor, Shechem, every man. They took Dinah from the house. Then the other brothers came, and plundered the flocks, the herds, the wealth, the women and the children.
One wound became another wound. One violence opened the door to more. The brothers wanted justice, but revenge swallowed its meaning.
Jacob said, You have brought trouble on me. The people of this land will hate us. His sons answered, Should our sister be treated like a prostitute?
Their question rose from a real wound. A wrong had truly been done. But Scripture leaves us standing in the terrible space between justice and revenge. The pain was real. The violence was real. And the violence did not heal the pain. It multiplied it.
No altar. No embrace. No reconciliation. Only a family carrying the weight of what happened.
And perhaps God’s silence in this chapter is itself a warning: when violence answers violence, the wound spreads wider, from one body to another, one household to another, one generation to the next.
Dinah’s voice is almost absent. That absence should trouble us. Everyone speaks of her, fights for her, avenges her, yet she herself is given no word.
So let us pause here, before honor, before revenge, before family pride, before swords. There is a woman who was hurt. And no one should disappear behind the anger of those who claim to defend her.
Genesis 34 stands like a dark stone on Jacob’s road. The God who met him at Peniel did not make every road after it easy. A new name does not erase an old world. The night at Peniel taught Jacob to let go. His sons were still learning. And so are we.
How to name a wrong without becoming the wrongdoer. How to seek justice without worshiping revenge. How to protect the wounded without wounding others. How to break the ancient chain: you hurt us, so we must hurt you.
Every generation must decide whether a wound will become a scar or a weapon.
And somewhere between Dinah’s silence and her brothers’ swords, God waits, not in the violence, but in the hard work of breaking it.
Perhaps holiness begins there, when we refuse to let another’s suffering become permission for our own violence.
The story ends without resolution. The wound remains. The road goes on. And Genesis asks us to keep walking, toward the day when justice no longer needs a sword, when dignity no longer needs revenge, and when the children of a wounded generation finally learn to leave the weapons on the ground.
Morning came over the Jabbok. Jacob lifted his eyes, and there was Esau, with four hundred men raising dust behind him.
The night of wrestling was over, but another night still lived in him. Fear remembers everything, the way a scar remembers the knife.
He divided his family and his flocks, and hid the ones he loved most at the back. Then he went forward alone, limping, and bowed seven times into the dust.
But Esau ran. He did not bring a sword. He opened his arms, fell on his brother’s neck, and kissed him, and both of them wept.
Twenty years of ice broke in one embrace. Reconciliation needs no speech at first, only two wounded people standing face to face at last.
“Who are these?” Esau asked. “The children God has graciously given,” Jacob said, and what he once grasped with his fist now lay in his open hand.
“I have enough, my brother.” The robbed one says enough, and the old theft dissolves like salt in the river.
“Please accept my gift, for to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” Last night he saw God at Peniel and lived. This morning the same face looked at him through his brother’s eyes.
The mirror of the heart, once wiped clean, shows the Beloved everywhere, even in the one we ran from and in the face we feared most.
We do not find God by escaping the one who wounded us. Sometimes the veil is thinnest where the old wound is deepest.
“Go on ahead,” Jacob said. “I will walk slowly, at the pace of the children and the nursing lambs.” Peace does not have to walk the same road. It is love without control, forgiveness that remembers the past honestly.
Esau turned toward Seir, and Jacob toward Succoth. They did not become what they had been, but the hatred no longer ruled the road.
He built shelters for the flocks, then an altar at Shechem, and called it El-Elohe-Israel, God, the God of Israel. The name was new, the man was new, and the limp remained.
The wound is where the light enters. Blessing does not take our wounds away. It pours through them, like lamplight through the crack in a clay jar.
He had died at the river before he died, and the grasping self lay buried in the Jabbok’s stones. Now, emptied, he could receive what he had spent his life trying to seize.
The night changed him, and the morning showed it. A drop that had fought the ocean all night let go at dawn and found it was already home.
Note: This is what coming home means. We do not go back to who we were. We walk forward with our wounds, until the face we feared becomes the face through which God teaches us to see.
God who wrestles with us in the dark and meets us in the morning, empty our clenched hands so we can receive Your grace. Wipe the mirror of our hearts until Your face shines in the brother and sister we have feared. Teach us to say enough, and to walk at the pace of the smallest among us. Let light enter through our wounds, until every road between us is free.
You can hear Bach drifting from a young mother’s earbuds, her baby asleep in the cart at Walmart, a quiet cathedral in the middle of ordinary aisles.
You can hear a lullaby rising from an underground band in an empty building, after their loudest scream set, tenderness blooming after thunder.
Ah, there are singers beyond the lines of soldiers, voices crossing borders no army can close, giving a comfort deeper than the simple shape of their song.
Beauty is born every moment we step past ourselves into the still pond of the eternal.
Music, painting, dancing, writing, all flow toward that one pond, a language everyone knows, each an echo of the Creator’s beauty.
Ah, so much of heart and soul is woven together this fall, joy spilling over into the dark caves of war and ruin.
Can you see it? Can you listen long enough to taste the peace hidden in this season full of surprises?
It lies beyond the reach of human words, spoken only by nature’s instruments, painted only by nature’s hand.
There is a moment before the harp is played, when the harpist leans in close and touches one string, then another, listening, turning a small key, listening again, until each note stands clear and distinct, and only then does she lift both hands and let the music come.
Last Sunday at St. Mark, Korenna Hodge sat at her harp and played “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” and “In the Garden,” and at the end we sang “All Are Welcome,” and every note was distinct, every word of the hymn something I could carry home.
1 Corinthians 14 has a harp in it. It has a bugle too, and a stranger at the door.
Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy. For those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.
Pursue love. The chapter begins where the last one ended. Love first. Then the gifts. Every gift measured by whether it builds up the other.
Upbuilding, encouragement, consolation. Three things a sermon is for. I wish I had written them on a card taped to the pulpit, these forty years. Not to impress. Not to win the argument. To build up. To encourage. To console.
Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the church. Now I would like all of you to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy.
Here it must be said plainly: Paul does not despise the gift of tongues. He speaks in tongues himself. I have Pentecostal friends, and brothers and sisters from the holiness churches, whose prayer rises in sounds I do not understand, and I have felt the Spirit in the room when they prayed. Paul’s concern is not the gift. It is the gathering. Who is built up when the church comes together?
Now, brothers and sisters, if I come to you speaking in tongues, how will I benefit you unless I speak to you in some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or teaching? It is the same way with lifeless instruments that produce sound, such as the flute or the harp. If they do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is being played? And if the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle? So with yourselves; if in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air.
The flute or the harp. A harp with every string loose, plucked and plucked, a blur of sound, no melody anyone could sing. And a bugle in the dawn camp, blowing something no soldier recognizes, so no one rises.
Speaking into the air. I remember, by way of reflection, the sermons I preached into the air, long words from seminary, Barth and Tillich and Moltmann, to farmers and nurses and schoolteachers who had come on a Sunday morning needing bread. I gave them a bugle with no clear call. They were patient with me. They were kinder than my sermons.
There are doubtless many different kinds of sounds in the world, and nothing is without sound. If then I do not know the meaning of a sound, I will be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker a foreigner to me.
A foreigner to the speaker. These are the words I take from 1 Corinthians 14.
I know what it is to be the foreigner. I crossed the sea long ago and stood in rooms where the words went past me like birds I could not name. And I know what it is to be the speaker who is foreign, preaching in a second language, my accent in every vowel, watching faces strain to follow me. Every Sunday for years I prayed, Lord, let them understand me. Let the gospel get through the strangeness of my tongue.
On Saturday the seventeenth, in Rome, Georgia, Deaf Christians gathered at a Baptist church for a day of worship and training, and a woman named Tarter, who is Deafblind, said, access is key, if you don’t have access to the information, it doesn’t matter what information you’re trying to share, you’re missing it. And a young Deaf worship leader taught how to interpret songs not only with the hands but with the face, the body, the rhythm, for those who cannot hear the music and know it by lyrics, beats, and vibration.
Access is key. Paul would have said it the same way. If they cannot receive it, it is speaking into the air.
And far away, this year, twenty-eight complete Bibles were launched, the whole Scripture now in more than eight hundred languages, among them the Marakwet people of Kenya. I think of an old woman in a Kenyan village hearing the psalms for the first time in the language her mother sang to her, no longer a foreigner to the Word.
So with yourselves; since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider add their yes to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying?
With the spirit and with the mind also. I remember, by way of reflection, the Methodist way I was taught, the warmed heart and the trained mind, John Wesley at Aldersgate, his heart strangely warmed, and the same Wesley reading Greek on horseback. Not one or the other. Both. The spirit that sings and the mind that understands what it sings.
The outsider. Paul keeps the stranger in view, the one at the back, the one who wandered in, who does not know when to stand, who cannot find the hymn number. Can they say yes to our thanksgiving? Can they follow the prayer? Worship is not a private room for those who already know the words.
I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you; nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.
Five words with my mind. This is the verse I keep turning over.
Five words. God is with you. You are not alone. Your sins are forgiven. Come, eat, there is room. I could have preached forty years on five words, and perhaps I did, under the ten thousand.
At seventy-seven my sentences grow longer, I lose the long word somewhere on its way to my mouth. And I find I do not mind. Five words, understood, are worth more than a library of brilliance. These poems I write now, short lines, plain words, are my five words offered at the end.
Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults. In the law it is written, By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people; yet even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.
In the law it is written. Paul turns again to Israel’s Scripture, to Isaiah, the prophet who knew that God speaks even through foreign lips. Here it must be said plainly: Paul does not turn this word against his people. He turns it toward the Corinthians, toward the church, toward me. The danger of not listening belongs to all of us.
Tongues, then, are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is not for unbelievers but for believers. If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all. After the secrets of the unbeliever’s heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, God is really among you.
God is really among you. I remember, by way of reflection, the prophet’s vision of nations coming to Israel, saying, God is with you alone. And the stranger in Corinth saying the same about a little house church of slaves and merchants. The highest praise a church can receive is not, what fine music, or, what a fine building, but, God is really among you.
The secrets of the heart disclosed. Not exposed for shame. Disclosed for healing. I have seen it, a visitor weeping in the back pew because a plain word touched the place no one had touched, and afterward saying at the door, how did you know? I did not know. The Spirit knew.
What should be done then, my friends? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn; and let one interpret. But if there is no one to interpret, let them be silent in church and speak to themselves and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. If a revelation is made to someone else sitting nearby, let the first person be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged. And the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.
Each one has a hymn. Each one. Not only the pastor. Not only the choir. A church where every person brings something, a hymn, a lesson, a word, and the others weigh it, and wait their turn, and let another speak. I think of all the Sunday mornings when I did most of the talking. Each one has a hymn. I should have listened more.
Let the first person be silent. A holy courtesy. When someone else has a word, sit down. Even the prophet stops talking when another rises. I am learning this too, at the church supper, at the family table, in old age. Let the first person be silent.
God is a God not of disorder but of peace. Shalom. Not the peace of a quiet room where no one dares to speak. The peace of a harp in tune, every string distinct, every voice heard, each in turn, making one music.
As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?
Here it must be said plainly: these lines have silenced women for nearly two thousand years. They have kept gifted women from pulpits, kept their voices out of councils, kept their wisdom at home. And these lines sit uneasily beside the same letter, where Paul assumes that women pray and prophesy aloud in the gathered church. Some ancient manuscripts place these verses in a different spot, and many faithful scholars wonder whether they were added later, or whether Paul was quoting the Corinthians’ own words in order to answer them. I do not know. I know only in part.
But I know this. I have heard the word of God from women in the pulpit, clear as a harp, building up, encouraging, consoling. My own church, long ago, opened its pulpits to women, and the Spirit did not leave the room. Did the word of God originate with you? No. It has reached the daughters too. It always has. Miriam with her tambourine. Deborah under the palm. Huldah reading the scroll for the king. Mary Magdalene in the garden, saying, I have seen the Lord.
Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized. So, my friends, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things should be done decently and in order.
Decently and in order. In my first years in this country I thought those words meant neat bulletins, straight rows, everyone seated by eleven o’clock. Now I think they mean something gentler. Order for the sake of love. Order so that the slow one can follow, so that the stranger can say yes, so that the Deaf worshiper can see the hands, so that the shy voice gets its turn. The order of a harp, tuned so the music can be heard.
And God whispered: Begin.
Not once, but every morning. Every time I choose five clear words over ten thousand clever ones. Every time I pray with the spirit and with the mind also. Every time I keep the stranger in view. Every time I sit down and let another speak. Every time I hear the word of God in a woman’s voice and give thanks. Every heart that rises after saying, I cannot, and then, after one long breath, Perhaps I can.
This is Corinthians in the language of my soul: love first, then every gift for building up, clear notes on a tuned harp, each one with a hymn, and a stranger at the door who says, God is really among you.
To pursue love. To speak five words with my mind. To keep the stranger in view. To let another speak. To make peace, not disorder.
The window is filling with light. In the next room my wife is humming a hymn, not loudly, just enough to carry, “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” the one the harp played last Sunday. I know the tune before I know the words, and then I know the words, and I hum along, off-key, an old man’s voice, and the two of us, in separate rooms, make one plain music in the morning house.
God of peace and not disorder, thank You for every clear word that reached me, in my mother tongue and in the language I learned across the sea. Teach me to speak five words that build up rather than ten thousand that only sound wise, and to keep the stranger and the Deaf and the slow always in view. Forgive the church for silencing the daughters You have called, and let every voice You give be heard. Tune us like a harp, each string distinct, so that whoever enters may say, God is really among you.
Two old people on a porch swing, moving slowly, her hand on his, neither of them speaking, the chains creaking, the yard going gold.
If the rib could speak, I think it would say:
I was taken from his side.
Not from his head, the old preachers said, to rule over him.
Not from his feet, to be walked on.
From his side, near his heart, to walk beside him.
God built a woman from me while he slept, and when he woke, he sang: at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
I don’t belong to him.
We belong to each other.
I take pleasure in three things, and they are beautiful in the sight of the Lord and of mortals: agreement among brothers and sisters, friendship among neighbors, and a wife and a husband who live in harmony.
A wife and a husband who live in harmony.
I stop here.
Fifty years.
Not always harmony.
My rough words.
Her patience.
And still, the swing, moving.
If you gathered nothing in youth, how can you find anything in old age?
How attractive is wisdom in the aged.
Rich experience is the crown of the aged, and their boast is the fear of the Lord.
The crown of the aged.
Not gold.
Gathered.
Then the chapter turns.
Any wickedness, but not the wickedness of a woman. No anger worse than a woman’s wrath. I would rather live with a lion and a dragon. A garrulous wife. Do not be ensnared by a woman’s beauty.
From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.
If she does not go as you direct, separate her from yourself.
I can’t read this quickly.
I won’t read past it.
I want to say clearly: this is not permission to blame, shame, harm, or silence any woman.
Not Eve. Not any wife.
Sin did not begin with a woman.
Paul himself said, in Adam all die.
Garrulous. Venom. Dragon.
These are insults.
I won’t repeat them as Scripture’s truth.
I grieve for every woman who heard these lines read over her in a church, in a kitchen, in a court, and believed them.
And for every wife sent away because she would not go as she was directed.
The old poet of the reed says: woman is a ray of God; she is not only the earthly beloved; she is creative, not created.
A ray of God.
Husband, fifty years, not always in harmony. Pastor, reading chapters like this and not saying enough. Old man, on the swing, her hand on mine, gathering.
I am a rib. I was taken from his side. Not from his head to rule him, not from his feet to be walked on. From his side, near his heart, to walk beside him. I don’t belong to him. We belong to each other.
And I, a tenelach, when the heart is a porch at the close of a long day, sit beside the one God built from my side, and put my hand on hers, and say nothing, and let the swing move, and the chains creak, and see, in her quiet face, not the woman the book blamed, but a ray of God,
shining.
Note: God who built woman from the side of man, not to rule or to be ruled but to walk beside, thank you for fifty years of a wife who stayed in harmony with me when I did not deserve it, forgive every tongue, the book’s and the church’s and mine, that said sin began with a woman, or called a wife a dragon or venom or garrulous, or sent her away for not going as she was directed, grieve with every woman who heard these words read over her and believed them, and heal what they broke, and let me see in every woman a ray of you, creative and not only created, and give me in my old age the crown of rich experience gathered, and her hand on mine.
Five years a stranger, in my own retirement, drifting outside the common world, a cup poured out, not yet knowing what wine it was being emptied for.
*
The caravan of hours moved on without me. The mornings rose on the far side of the dunes. And sleep, that shy bird, would come near my hand and never land.
*
Ten years retired, I listened for the old drum, the pulse that once kept time for me, the hidden heartbeat that carried me through my days the way a mother carries a child who does not know he is moving.
The drum was gone. Only silence answered, and in the silence, a door.
*
Now I go down into the quiet rooms of the heart, where time forgets its hurry, where night is a cocoon spun from slow light, and the old self sleeps like a silkworm dreaming of wings.
Die before you die, the night whispers, and I am not afraid.
*
Now I rise, at three, at the lamp, with a new rhythm in me, not found, not borrowed, but grown from within, the way a rose does not search for its color.
The cup is empty now. The Cupbearer has begun to pour.
*
This is my adjustment: a turning, a returning, a re-turning, the moth back to the flame, the drop back to the sea, each step carrying me closer to myself, and in myself, to the One who was closer to me than my own breath all along.
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