Behold, I make all things new

Behold, I make all things new

There was a yesterday, pulling at my mind,
disclosing the expected mundane self
reacting, not inclined to throw the clay
upon the wheel, to love without a cause,
to walk the forest path seen overgrown again
and yet there was an incompleteness hovering.

It was as if a man would be content
caressing all the little treasures
that he knew and loved--the ones he kept
within a little box that rested close at hand.
Old friendly ghosts were there for nourishment
and with emollients for dying days.

And yet there was a scent upon the wind.
There was a voice, more powerful than ears accommodate,
that beat upon the modest self
that hides beneath my consciousness,
brought forth like Lazarus and swathed
in winding sheets, reluctant to arise.

A working Christ would be like that.
No force of arms, no epithet of conquest
nor a blooded history to write.
A gentle call into the tomb would do it—
just a soft reminder
that there is no grace in sleep
beneath a monument or stone—
that there is glorious bursting of the night
in store; there is a paradise to own.

It takes that tug upon the consciousness.
It takes an empty page or two
before the forward to a mound of years
set down. The alpha and omega bow
before that bright eternity of now
and are consigned to rhetoric;
there are the stars aborning,
charted, crumbling as their yesterday
becomes today.
~