...if You Ever Wonder What You've Done

I Believe That Reality Is Vastly Richer Than The Cursory Attention We Usually Give It Permits Us To Understand. I Like To Write Through A Consciousness That Allows Me To Suggest Something Of This Richness.

The Assumption Behind Any Theology That I've Ever Been Familiar With Is That There Is A Profound Beauty In Being, Simply In Itself. Poetry, At Least Traditionally, Has Been An Educing Of The Beauty Of Language, The Beauty Of Experience, The Beauty Of The Working Of The Mind, And So On. The Pastor Does, Indeed, Appreciate It.

That Is How Life Goes--we Send Our Children Into The Wilderness. Some Of Them On The Day They Are Born, It Seems, For All The Help We Can Give Them. Some Of Them Seem To Be A Kind Of Wilderness Unto Themselves. But There Must Be Angels There, Too, And Springs Of Water. Even That Wilderness, The Very Habitation Of Jackals, Is The Lord's.

I Wrote Almost All Of It In The Deepest Hope And Conviction. Sifting My Thoughts And Choosing My Words. Trying To Say What Was True. And I'll Tell You Frankly, That Was Wonderful.

A Narrow Pond Would Form In The Orchard, Water Clear As Air Covering Grass And Black Leaves And Fallen Branches, All Around It Black Leaves And Drenched Grass And Fallen Branches, And On It, Slight As An Image In An Eye, Sky, Clouds, Trees, Our Hovering Faces And Our Cold Hands.