in the silent frosty middle
you know the place, it dangles
from a frayed and rotted rope
by its twisted, broken neck
never climbing to the heavens
never rising, never sinking
finally to hell…suspended
still-born in the dead black moment

struck hard by fiery unjust suffering
lightening bolts of frozen mystery
electric silence of a God
who seems to become floaty-fog…
…and go missing in that moment…
that cold and lonely hour of greatest need.

And Defiance?
And Hope?
And Memory?
And Wrath?
Or Mercy?

God’s absence…ever-present metronome
clicking seconds tangible
but measured in life’s lurking horrors,
haunted concentration camps
shrieking dust-wreathed empty chairs
silent tables lacking breath
just one long open exhale
lasting always occupied
by aching absence of the Loved ones
gone…just gone…replaced by absence…
lurking pervert, shadow present
of God Absent in the hanging
in the hollow hanging black…

Or is it
Holy Black? Yes.
Afloat in Holy Black.
In the times of Holy Black…
This Holy Black when God seems absent
in our need, we are too small,
inconsequential lost in mystery
I ask where is God? Where am I?
Where is Divine Mercy Sweet?
How can I (or anyone)
Slip that rough coarse choking rope?

I go forward
They are not there,
backward, but
I can’t perceive Them.

When They act on the left,
I cannot behold Them;
They turn on the right,
I cannot see Them.
And yet I find in anguished cries
against God’s absence, They are present!
Present in my blank assumption
that Their Silence equates absence
and tenacious faith in God
who seems so distant from our pain,
and silent to our acrid cries,
and absent from our acid world.

In the face of certain suffering
how else can I affirm God’s presence
in my midst except by taking
issue with injustice in this moment
of God’s long apparent ringing absence
God’s abandonment in the midst of towering suffering?
My protest against God’s pressing pregnant silence
would be deprived of dignity and meaning
if there were no Presence behind the Silence.

mercy and justice are enthroned
in a higher heaven still
and in this Lenten season,
in our hungry self denial
as we blindly grope around
in that towering Spiraling Darkness
of our own imperfect vision
and our wakened apprehension
of our God, we will to wrestle
with God’s absence so we can come
to experience the presence
of God in a different way
not that hanging purgatory
twisting in the idiot wind…no
Us and God…Afloat in Holy Black
“I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye has seen you.”

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