“Before they call, I will answer.” ~ Isaiah 65: 24
Close to midnight, and it’s raining again.
This hushed: no noisy exchange of crows,
no yellow-billed bickering of cuckoos.
All day I merely counted out, did inventory:
cups of strong coffee, clink of silverware; bread
and butter, pink and white circles of radish
on the dinner plates. Now the rain’s
a flickering curtain, blue-green outside
window glass. On my desk, an old prayer card
where a heart crimson as a globe of fruit
is ringed by thorns, gold-leafed in flame.
Imagine if I took it in my hands,
laid it on the sill or hung it from a branch.
Imagine a ripe fig washed clean by rain,
glistening for the hand that chooses it.
[LAG-signature date=”06 28 2011″ url=”http://morningporch.com/2011/06/28/159121836″]
Oh, this one speaks to me. My faith has those kitschy gaudy images too, impossibly overwrought and yet so unpretending that they move you to reverence — as if they were not works of human artifice at all, but just primal reflexes of devotion. You respond to them as if they were natural phenomena.