Thirst
I don’t know why the grocery was crowded,
densely packed with bodies,
jammed together like the potatoes in their bin.There were too many carts to move through,
so I stood still in the traffic like a commuter
trying to make it back to the suburbs
like everybody else.It gave me time to look down the aisles
that I didn’t want to travel,
to wonder at the magnificent array
A hundred soups. A thousand cereals.
A million choices.The flood of drinks overwhelmed me most,
a whole aisle to themselves,
without counting the booze.
Ninety feet of alternatives
for people thirsting for more than water.People thirst for more and more,
sweet, bitter, sour, savory,
flavors by the dozens,
berry, leaf and root,
bottled in the by-products of oil,
which was a by-product of life long ago
and time,
which separates us now from
the age when what we craved most
was water.Water,
piped to our homes,
chilled or iced or heated like magic,
evoking envy in all the lifeless planets,
its plenty essential to the flourishing of our age,
a marvel our ancestors could not imagine,Yet still not good enough for us.
The Prophet's Word
I'm grateful for the annual day marked off to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Racial reconciliation and justice is something always bubbling just beneath my consciousness, and MLK day forces it to the surface. It forces me to reflect specifically on the man's legacy, but also on my own engagement with his cause.This year, I was glad to participate in our small town's March in memory of Dr. King. It was surreal and powerful, walking with my children, surrounded by a slice of our community.I also try to spend some time reading some of Dr. King's work, and this year I sat down with his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It's an amazing piece of work, and its power to convict holds today. The challenging letter calls out the White church for their silence in the face of the struggle for civil rights, and every paragraph burns. The letter is inspiring, instructive, and stinging throughout, and if it's been a while since you've read it, it's worth sitting down with for a half hour. Word for word, it's one of the most important things the church produced in the last century.
I also spent a little time trying to reflect poetically on what it means for me, living more than 50 years later, to try and pick up the echo of Dr. King's message. What came out was the little poem below, which I shared at the ceremony on Monday.There's much work to be done, my friends. May the Lord be with us.The Prophet's WordDreamer, Seer,Prophet, Preacher,Sent to us, the Nineveh next door,He willingly went,Walked,Marched,From you, with youTo us, at us,With just the word we needed,a word we could not hear.We could only see it,See its drama enacted,While it called out the violence within us.We could not hear the word,but we could see it,and be seen by it.We could not hear it, but the word would not depart.Its echo rumbles through the canyon still,While the unseen water rushes on below,like a mighty stream.
They Came From
A day of long meetings,hours gazing into computer screens,competitive offices and tense meetings,projects with deadlines, orquotas needing to be filled.They came from soccer practice,from the field and its gloryor the parking lot,where the August sun drains the life out ofmoms in minivans.She came from a lonely home,from an easy chair that sitsin front of a droning television,next to an end table with an empty coffee cup,and a phone that never rings.They came from homework,chapters underlined and blanks filled in,some of them right, some of them wrong,some left undone,waiting to be turned in for approval.He came from the worst fight,(or at least it feels that way),that he's ever had with his wife.Tomorrow's might be worse,might be the one that ends it all.And here they all are, together.Though they are alsoin those places, still.