Innocence is a better world, but I
Can hardly imagine the Lord keeps
No count against me.
I was bent double over
My riddle days, wracked and walking
The years of my life backward.
Lives I thought I’d lost honeycombed
And hunched down like winter bees
Eating my heart’s honey.
I shuddered long, stuttering prayers
That never gathered to a point,
And left me still as full of secrets
As a wet bag of blood.
Your burning palm pressed me down.
I sizzled and blackened.
My strength bubbled and boiled away.
I held myself together
And waited to be overthrown.
When I sickened enough on silence,
My story broke out of me. I confessed.
I did not know there was so much to say.
I stacked secrets I could hardly name
In neat rows under the open face
Of God’s high heaven. I told the whole thing.
I told the break of it, the dogged, gagged guilt;
The wail of it; the haggard, sweet grit of it.
It raised me on a wild, terrifying tide
Of words without lies.
And I was lifted, forgiven, concealed,
Consoled, held, ushered in. My God!
Will every broken trust be mended?
Everyone who wants to find God, come.
Everyone who wants the plain peace
Of the holy world in their hands again, come.
Everyone who wants to sit in silence
Inside the walls of their old fidelities,
Come and buy joy back again.
God is a high hiding place in a flood.
His love won’t quit,
And he hasn’t met his match yet.
So watch me. Learn from me.
Listen where the honey is;
To buzzing bruises that have been singing
So low, so long you hardly hear them.
Sorrow is a sly teacher with long,
Loud lessons that don’t stop
Once its angry engines fire alive.
But if you go the whole way, even love
Will loop around and hem you in
If you let it.
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