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 outside,

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 pearl-point pulsing gland 

spurts the stars into your forehead

before you see them in the night,

and the fragrance of love drifts through umber petals

the way the soul exits a crinkled body,

except that the soul is only a description of itself,

but the scent of the withered flower is real,

unpredicated on thought.

We say, "In the beginning,"

but this place is before the beginning.

We say, "was the Word,"

but why assume it is a noun?

Very well then, "In the beginning was the Verb."

Please, no pronouns.

The act of creation is as thing-less

as the act of destruction,

with no "He said" or "She said."

The earth is simply a terrible sweetness

that finally consumes every tongue

and melts our eyes,

because the world we can name

is only our description of it,
like the soul.
Jesus and Mary grow weary of their

disembodied stains on a cathedral window
fixed in a catechism of glass.
They long to dissolve in the beams
that pass through them.
They would rather dazzle us as verbs

like fall, obliterate, enchant,
describing how we arrived here
at the tip of a thorn
in the garden of the fire-rose
where names, shapes, certainties
must perish in a holocaust
of wonder.