We’ve closed our theatres—a silence rules.
Homebound with Internet and iPhones, stocked
with everything we’d want as hoarding fools,
we double check to see our doors are locked.
Elizabethans closed their theatres
in plague years; Shakespeare scribbled poems for praises.
Today each playwright (one is me) utters
in keyboard clacks: free verse or formal phrases.
Yet theatres keep one bare light bulb burning
on stage, illuminating emptiness.
1914–1943
There’s no containing what we
call God, force-field of agape
love, nameless, wild, omnipresent
within the seed, the star, the sparrow,
galaxies and grains of sand, limitless
without exception, mystery beyond
our knowing, beyond and in all sons
and daughters, in those who show us
how to live, stripped of self to flower
forth, the desert blooms, the spark
ignites the Dali Lama, Desmond Tutu,
Rumi, Etty Hillesum singing, yes,
singing, on the train to the camps.
See better, Lear. (King Lear, 1.1)
Last words—alleluia, alleluia—echo as we
gather coats, bulletins, purses, hopes,
shut away our prayers again with the names
of the dead in jeweled glass, polished brass,
a clatter of coins in the collection plate.
Full moon wafer of bread, broken with
a snap, like bone, chalice lifted and left,
wavering candles snuffed one by one as
the cross departs with the last pale notes
of another requiem and we turn again—
stumbling—to our brief, our borrowed life.
When the Colonel from Monterey picked me up
at a gas station in Rock Springs, Wyoming,
he said it was my short sleeves—no tracks to hide.
I had just combined a bowl of grapenuts with powdered
milk at a rusty sink in the men’s room, having hitched
a day and a night from Sawtooth Ridge in Yosemite.
Piercing night ascending
descending sky to ground our light footfalls
in fluid motion pass through air make
no sound No spiral or criss-cross flights
but one uninterrupted series of stairs
ten thousand climbing angels in glowing white
ten thousand more trodding down
down from heaven’s height
from the foot of God’s own throne
right down to a stone a shaken scoundrel’s
In a theological tome I read
“opening the world to God”
which echoes in my ear
a quarter tone off pitch,
just enough to make choirs
of angels and archangels wince.
Surely that is backwards.
The whole amazing universe,
every minute or enormous thing,
is a door opening into God,
a summons to eternity
in a dust-to-dust creation,
an invitation to adoration,
the substance of forever.
“They have taken away my lord . . . and I don’t know
where they have put him.” —John 20:13
She knew these things: a body doesn’t walk.
Soldiers can’t be trusted. Gossips will talk.
She made her way there in the early dark.
She knew the stories—Noah and the Ark,
Jonah and the whale, David and the stone,
the things a man can accomplish alone.
Even so, she couldn’t quite conceive
how a dead god could just up and leave
And the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! I know that you are
seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just
as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” Matthew 28:5–6