Morning Prayer

I awoke at 6 A.M. with this prayer in my heart and on my breath: "Let all that we see around us, all that we call the world, full of sorrow and injustice, be annihilated in the fire of your vision, O Lord of destruction, Lord of love, for vision is the root of our healing." (October 1, 2024)

 

In a space neither inside nor without,

in a silence prior to mind,

the fire-rose burns a black hole

through your retina

into the turquoise sky

at the back of your skull

where a tiny blue gland contains the stars

and the fragrance of love drifts
through umber petals

the way a soul exits the crinkled body,

except that the soul is only
a description of itself,

but the scent of this withered flower
is real, un-predicated on thought.

We say, "In the beginning,"

but the place where we are now

is before the beginning.

We say, "...was the Word,"

but why assume it is a noun?

"In the beginning," then, "was the Verb,"

neither in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.

No pronouns, please.

Perhaps there are no nouns either,

and the act of creation is as thing-less
as the act of destruction.

The earth is a terrible sweetness

that finally consumes every tongue

and melts our eyes.

For the world we can name

is only our description of it,
like the soul.
Jesus and Mary are weary
of their disembodied stains
on the cathedral window
fixed in a catechism of glass.
They long to dissolve in the beams
that pass through them
and dazzle us as verbs
like "fall," "obliterate," "enchant,"
which describe how we arrive here
at the tip of a thorn
in the garden of the fire-rose
where names, shapes, and certainties
must perish.