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Soul Searching (An Apology of Sorts)
Years we spent together in parallel lives,
reading Shakespeare and Alan Paton
in a high school basement room where
on the chalkboard you scrawled a laughable,
inevitable oxymoron-of-the-day.
You were an ambling adolescent Dr. Who
under big hair and bigger scarf;
you drove a gently wayward ride
through midtown streets in your cluttered van
that seemed larger than your Speedway apartment,
where I tried not to step on
your fluffy white Poco the Wonder Dog,
your piles of thinking-man’s books,
your soul drifting through a murky pride
of not wanting to concede He was Holy,
He was Beyond. Unless I see you again,
how can I assure you He has earned that name?
To their stubborn faces, you mocked mall preachers,
so-called soothsayers who pushed
a bitter cold god they called the Word of God,
but whom you called Ignorance.
Your loud disdain for them and their kind
kept you from hearing my sweet Lord
calling for you in his strange tongue,
but all the same, you sought to overturn the tables
in his temple courts. Unless I see you again,
how can I confess that I, too,
always found those mall gods false?
How bitterness must have haunted you
your twenty-first year, a first betrayal
at the hands of so-called friend and so-called love,
a second betrayal in the clenching hands of physics,
with bike wheels that spun enough force to throw
another man to his death.
Have you ever returned to that underpass,
where no cyclists are now allowed?
With desperation, you must have pressed your
broken wheels even harder. Unless I see you again,
how can I insist that no wheel can carry you
far enough from harsh regret? There are only
grace, faith, hope, and love to undercut the underpass.
You have cared for those you took as friends,
tossing them birthday cake from your bare hands,
breaking so-called rules for the sake of joy.
You have spoken out for those who would not speak,
like the king of the Island of Misfit Toys, seeking
to find everyone a good home, a soft place to fall
and to fall again. And so I would have fallen for you,
but I was called to step back to love you and to pray
miles away from you, a hair-breadth away from God,
and how can I ever explain, unless I see you again?
Karen Bradley
December 2003 |
