after a year and a half this is emerging...

Mmhmm...

[Hopeland]

The embers of a bruised mango sun

draw shapes across concrete floor

And while we wash red earth from our feet

 I remember: "The Lord God formed man from dust"

Tongue carved into the arch of my mouth,

It was in tall grass with a skirt in serpentine twists

 that I buried god along with a calling

that had whispered to me as a child

A suit and tie told me doubt tastes

of lukewarm stale cola, but life grew wings

and song filled my veins with helium

kneeling into mama's dirt, I weed the poisons of holy books. 

It was in a street, filled with the skies burden

of rain, the hoarding of months,

that I was baptized into hopeful doubt

 Africa, you began all this. 

Tonight we sit on the porch clenching mugs

a last defense

and I confess my prayers lately have been:

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She says, "Maybe Jesus is a leaf."

You aren't dead. You're reincarnated.

Mystery, mystery, mystery. 

I tremble to repeat it, fear and exhilaration. 

I sat an inch from a lifeless body

and discovered new hollows

for this ache too shallow

caverns, caverns 

No, I never told my mother

that I laid my Bible in a grave 

heart howling, shaking, finally exhaling. 

It was black skin that taught me joy,

that forgave my whitewashed sins.

***

And this, was the calm of the day: If Jesus is the Way, then Truth with a capital T lies in a person, and a relationship to Truth as a person is completely different than truth as a proposition. When you marry someone no matter how intimately you know them, they remain a mystery. And that is how Jesus/Truth will remain, intimacy and mystery.