In the Turn of Time - poetry

 And, so, in the turn of time,

the wheeling of the stars, if you can see ‘em,

the earth swinging around the light,

and the light swirling amid the Milky 

expanse of a small to middlin’ galaxy, 

in one far corner of something

beyond imagination and grasp,

measured in time impossible, and distance

at the speed of light.

And, so, here I am.

A blip … a speck … a mote of dust.

Dust, would you believe?

The Bible says God shaped the dust,

and then blew something of God’s heart

into the dust, into it’s nostrils, the nose.

The nose knows, I suppose, what the rest of the body

has been trying to figure out forever.

Where did this stuff come from?

This dust, this breath, the nose, the madness.

I’m here, and so are you.

And we’re working at something called love.

“Love one another” says Jesus.

And we can barely manage it.

What we do well is hate.

We do that with skill and cunning and brilliance.

For every love we might manage, we’ve got a ton

of hatred, ill-will, suspicion, and malice of forethought.

The nose still knows … the breath of God.

Like a dog on a walk, suddenly stopping

to sniff the air, we catch a hint of the original wind

that made this little heap of dust become a living being.

A soul, a nephesh, nearly divine, even as the dust

swirls around our feet, and fills our homes with

the past.

DNA and tribal instincts makes us hate.

Original sin?

We wanted … and we suspected God

cheated us.

We took it, and damn, if God wasn’t right.

Take it, and you’ll die, said God.

And we thought God was b-s-ing us.

But God wasn’t, not at all.

Death has been stalking us ever since, 

and to ease the burden on our minds,

we give death away by the handful, 

every day … we give it away,

and dress it up with our righteous hatreds,

and wonder why death still clings to us

like some kind of black mold in the corner

of the drawer.

Ah, yes, so here I am … this little dust mote, 

a fly speck, some might say.

A smear of nonsense on the wall.

A stench to the earth and its water.

A blot upon the snow.

The nose knows … and I pause for a moment

in the hush of the morning, and I lift my

head to the hills, just north of town.

And I think of God … and hardly know

what to do with it.

But God remains in my mind, stuck there,

like a nagging thought, that I am what

I am, and then some … a bit more than

meets the eye.

Could be, I think, could be.