My native tongue...

"Deep in your blood or a voice in your head
On a dark lonesome highway
It finds you instead
So certain it knows you, you can't turn away
Something or someone has found you today..."

I pray in poems
Unrhymed stanzas of
long undulating metaphors and
vivid mental pictures
that pierce complacency
and leave me aching
for moments
that are pregnant with Your
infinite nearness...
your touch so familiar
I cannot tell if it is my own
hand upon my heart...or Your
fingers on the pulse of my desires
palpating them into life...
so close I sometimes
cannot see
the Forest for
the trees...

But...
in these poems
There are lines
I cannot speak
Sentences that
catch in my throat and pen
and make my fingers
hover above the keyboard
hesitant to string letters
together in a way
that will reveal what
simmers within
the chambers
of prayer

my sacred words
may
not be welcome
in 
their sanctuary

i write about
You

i pour my
prayer
onto the page
and it reads like
a lunatic woman
beating her breast
weeping and
wailing

i can't seem to find
the words to
say
how
far into
this sanctuary of earnest
     longings...
this chapel of surrender
this triage of healing and salvation
this gnashing 
and wrestling with angels...
Your eloquent silence
has taken me

is the sacred in us
so raw
and unsettling
and naked...and messy
that
all the hymns we sing
all the solos written
all the articles
all the testimonies

are only a tellable
version
of
what
causes us to
rock ourselves to sleep
...tears
pouring
out so endlessly
that we  finally
have enough
to wash
feet

were the first
40 days
so unspeakable
that he only shared
the thoughts
that followed...
thoughts that were
more palatable to
a world of followers,
admirers
and disciples
that would
make him
their Messiah

or were they so private
so intimate
so completely
self-shattering
that
he could not let them
(or us)
into that place
of deep
nakedness

I have no default behavior
no
practiced coping skills
no
false convenient mask
of acceptable words
for painting
the landscape
of
this
journey....

toward You

"I don't remember a voice
On a dark, lonesome road
When I started this journey so long ago
I was only just trying to outrun the noise
There was never a question of having a choice..."
-Mary Chapin Carpenter

Kate