God, morning and night
I feel the coarse fingertips of your grip tighten around my shoulder
Your matted calves sweep my ankles
I feel you ring my temple and bash my bones
and I feel my devotion and praise rise towards your face
as the beads of sweat drip down from yours to my body to the ground
I taste the dust I come from, morning and night
I feel the bruises of faith as I take off my clothes, roll on my back, sleep under your loving gaze
My heart aches at you God
I don’t understand
and yet the dull pain in my chest stretches each one of my heartchambers into a temple mount for you to lay your presence in
I’m thirsty for your body in my chest
I wish you could show us the way
I don’t know how we got here
We’re lost
I’m lost
and I don’t know whether I’ve taken a wrong turn or if each road reaches the same wasteland or if there is no road at all
I sometimes catch a glimpse of you
Under a thicket of bramble
Or the heaving body of a rotting tree stump
But I blink and it flitters away
Even with the sting of the dust-I-come-from
filling up my taste buds and pores
All I want to do is know your name
Understand why you laid out such a struggle
and split your people like cardamom seed and threw the spice in our eyes
Stole our vision and turned us backwards and round and round again and
sent us sprinting full-force into a direction we couldn’t see
Before we’d even found our feet
God, morning and night
My heart begs to know:
How come you kill us
How come you make us strong
How come you plant trauma in our genes and then
How come you don’t strip it out right away
It feels like our hand is on the stove
- not on it -
in the flame
It feels like our flesh has charred away and you watch us cry in agony and somehow you don’t pull us away
Don’t turn down the fire
How come you keep turning up the fire
We’re only kids
We’re only your kids
How come you teach us wrong
Where did we fail to learn
Where can we walk your path, where every step is broken glass
How can we bow our knees, when then they buckle under weight
How can we scream your name if then our throats are left a waste
How can we love you if you keep breaking us
How can I love you, God
in this shattered shell, in this shattered soul