a sestina...sort of throws together my contemporary art class with one on theodicy as it pertains to wisdom literature, plus I went walking by the river...
Wondering about Wonder, We Start Where it Stops
Everyone has their own image of God;
trees throng mine, towering, so there's no chance
of ignoring them, not breathing their love.
Wet ground stirs profound sadness: broken
wonder tossed asunder by a choice
vulnerability, water's poem.
Total control can murder a poem—
lead one to trust an unjust, stagnant God
expressing charity as if it were a choice,
a singular happenstance ruled by chance,
which augments hierarchy; words get broken
into ideologies, token love.
Warbling passion, humble, effortless love
seeps out of the earth, weeps like a poem
or a river, grace awoken and broken
by the same source of mnemic force that God
sows in the mind for us to find by chance
later in a dance, stumbling upon choice
by manifesting voice, but is it choice
that pulls a statue out of stone? When love,
so scarcely known, spills forth from skin, does chance
provoke its purpose into a poem?
I've been collecting questions to ask God
(of sunken ships, bodies being broken).
One woman asks, who has not been broken?
Students stare, then start to compare choice
with motive in the many masks of God.
I reflect and know I project love
onto the divine, sing a poem
to the sky, as if there were no chance
of not being heard. But is it a chance
to think of sacred treasures as broken
pots, palm ashes, a half-buried poem?
All appeal to tangibility, choice.
Not quite dead, deep ritual red love
pulsates in fusillading pother, God.
Living, whether by chance or by choice,
bread is broken. I wander, loosing love,
another poem, another God.