The day after Holy Week. It is bittersweet. Bitter, because all that the week promises in its wealth of life-giving news and hints of transformation is gone for another year. Sweet, because such a grand narrative is never over. It is always just beginning.

For National Poetry Month and to honor a most delightful day at a local Christian camp, I offer the following:

 

Rimrock retreat – a day at Ghormley Meadows

 

Rimrock, rustic and real with space

to contain all that’s empty.

The rugged road cast before feet apace

where moon outshines the sun’s identity-

but loses out to one yet brighter.

 

Pillaged, austere and raw this one comes

bent and spent he went round

and there to see tomb unmanned, he’d won

what spillage, spewed, is spared, fixed and found.

I was blind but now have sight, or

 

is all that sees as blind or lost

as one whose eyes are just downcast?

For just to see is not to walk, wind-toss’d

and free from nature’s slighted past.

Between the stones of each one’s road

 

grow wild, still, evidences of strangely new

that mix with voices old to taunt

and vie for the once-free. But they, too

must retreat or be removed like mustard-mount

seeds of faith renewed, of hope, sowed

 

to keep and deepen the promised field

of unswept dreams and unkept pains;

detritus of lesser gods gives way to peals

of forest bells and words and Word unstain’d

This one’s tale of a Tale once and forever told.