Monday, September 20, 2010

Of Stained-Glass Windows

In birth, the light shows itself, violently.
In death, the light hides itself, kindly.
In life, we see but through a glass darkly.



Our eyes, like two tiny portholes, speak in whispers regarding our sea-roar surroundings. We try to raise our eye-voices, but we know not what to say; in silence, we wait,
counting raindrops as they freckle the glass.
We weigh and measure these Hints,
as if They will come and explain Themselves to us - explain from whence They came.

[We are those ships that feel the wind but cannot see from where It's come.
We turn, suddenly, expecting to find It staring back at us,
but there is nothing to be seen - not through eyes such as ours, anyhow,
grayed with disbelief as they are]

But when we are awakened by the Great Morning,
we find that we are instead stained-glass windows,
and so the Hints come creeping through each crack until our bones are wet
with the stained-glass-paintbrush display...

...And how welcome are these chromatic pilgrims,
wanderers on these cloudy seas!
Suddenly we find that we have known all along what to say,
and it was only at first that we did not know
the colors, the strokes, the language
with which to speak these things:

- Come in, you Red and Green!
and you, ocean-wet Aquamarine!
Come and fill our pale frames
with Your technicolor certainty,
'Cause our bodies ache,
and we are oh, so tired of
this bleak and blurry glass -

we raise our voices, paled by possibility -
and we do not stop our words from running from our tongues

until we hear ourselves say
that which we have always known,
until Your color runs over us

and what is in becomes Out, and Out, in,
and everything Is what It could have been.



*photo from here