Open Spaces
by rebecca ~ March 2nd, 2006. Filed under: Poems & art.
Faith doesn’t materialize in human breath,
in an utterance of Sanskrit or ancient Hebrew or
in the foam at the top of a tall glass of milk
directly brought from the udder to your lips.
Faith has more to do with silence than speech,
more with the open spaces among the notes and words.
I have never seen it, unless it might be those floating
colored specks a child sees, eyes closed, when facing the sun.
Grass turns to velvet. And ants, beads of lapis lazuli.
There’s another kind of faith people like to talk about,
while chasing azures with nets, but it never fills the soul
with triumphant towering clouds or human wings.
At best, it stuffs the mouth with cotton and sedulously
sets copper coins on man’s closed eyes.
Let go of the notions of acquiring hope via the holes
of the body and re-frame the journey by hoisting
an ax to the five gilded frames of your world. Chop away!
My advice, at surface, appears noisy, violent, extreme.
But if you took my initial advice to heart
then it’s in the pause before and after where belief
cradles your head and whispers your wordless name.
Lean into the silence
of a cut lemon and dance to the symphony
of an orange tree in bloom. Faith roams freely
the earth, the body, the mind. No shadow slows it down.