Flaming Sword

Flaming Sword

This moment, with its teasing hint of summer rain,

this sultry day and this languorous self I am so unbusily being,

this is the slow-moving forward edge of the flowing rivers 

of time and choosing.

There is a story to begin and a promise at the end,

our ancestors taking in the fruit,

taking in the difference, 

the apartness

from god, from world, and from each other, 

naïve bonds now broken

that held the otherness at bay.

Do you remember summer days

with Kool-Aid, bologna,

badminton, sand-piles, 

swimming, sand-piles,

cousins, and naps? 

We didn’t look behind the curtain,

didn’t see or hear the wizards – 

parents, uncles, aunts – 

who in the midst of who-knows-what?

held the Oz-world open for us,

who knows how?

Between then and now is the bramble

of adolescence, confusions and hurts,

of growing up, of aging

and of death. There are scars,

we all have scars; 

we make them on each other,

and tend them on each other, too.

Long after the charm wore off, 

deep into the impossible work

of seeing, in the strangeness

the strange, hard wealth of difference, 

I might have turned,

might have walked, casually,

back towards that perfect summer day,

the pool in the creek, the cold drink,

the surprising feel of small fish

around my feet.

But before I could get close 

to the eastern edge of before,

there was the angel, 

flaming sword in hand,

the words not needing to be spoken:

You may remember. 

You may not return.

Do you, too, know that angel well?

Every attempt to re-live 

some past innocence,

or re-litigate some past hurt or folly, 

some wound, either on or by me,

every nostalgia, every settling of accounts

fails at an angel’s appearing. 

The fruit of a tree

in a garden we left behind

will never fill us.

By sweat and pain we do our human work,

seed and harvest, passion and birth.

What was so simply one, 

on that summer day, 

in that innocent garden,

fell apart when we looked behind the curtain,

when we took our place behind the curtain,

wizards, parents, uncles, aunts, 

holding the Oz-world open for our children,

hoping they wouldn’t look, 

and knowing they would.