Lord, what a wandering season
circling about you
stones in my shoes.
Lord, what a weary season:
I go out and come back
not finding
those streams,
those quick and laughing streams.
The memory plays about these dusty days
like music.
Once when I was young,
creek wading in springtime,
the banks flushed and full
all the pebbles gleamed and shone
in the quick water,
the brown ordinary bumps transformed
to brilliance.
Manna, I think
must taste like the white wafers
at church: hardly a remembering
of bread, stale,
hard to swallow without wine.
Easy to grow weary of such food.
I hold out my hand for the white disk again
and again,
I go in and come back,
I return to you, searching.
I remember the press of brightness,
whiter than white, bluer than blue,
enough to crush me
into silence, a weight and light
to fill up heaven
to press into the earth
to fill up every fold of it.
I could not hold --
Oh Holy --
I would go on dying forever there
in that whiteness,
but one does not hold glory
as one might hold a stone.
One goes on walking, in and out
returning, hoping.
