Poetry

The wind farmer releases the wind

The strange notion of rûaḥ in the Hebrew Scriptures shatters
taxonomies, leaving us to ask mistakenly, “Is rûaḥ wind? Breath?
Spirit? Or spirit?” In particular, rûaḥ causes tidy dichotomies to
splinter, neat categories to fragment.

                —Jack Levison, A Boundless God

 

There are no crosses on the wind farm. The turbines,
with their three blades and the great arcs they make,
refuse the stasis of upright and crossbeam,
to their singular place they are also free, they spin,
they make their rounds. And wind is breath, is spirit
in Hebrew after all, the blades are tuned and turned
to the wind, to the spirit, nothing men have ever made
is so cleverly, closely tuned, so capable of drawing
true power from what looks like nothing, what moves
beyond chance or habit in its great whorls and streams.

What preacher behind his oaken fort can hope to speak
so craftily, so truly of the power, of the sizzle and shame,
the buzz and hum and emptiness spinning in the heart
of things. What nun or priest or worship singer
could chant or sing or bellow so precisely so well
of the secret messenger, the vast and complicated wind,
the wind without border or end, the wind that is
ghost and spirit, breath, the inbreath and outbreath
of the being more real and tenuous than dark matter,
than strings or quarks or whatever particles, spins,
sparkling bits of almost nothing make up the heart
of the real, the spirit, the wind, the breath, and yes,
what can sing like the long blunt blades of the wind machine,
the blades that cut nothing but the wind and know
the wind flows back together, smoother than any water.