Poetry

BEFORE AND AFTER SINAI

by Walter Boswell
04/09/19
Free to Share
Author requests article critique

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

Before and After Sinai

PERSONAL SINAI

Onto the hill which has been the site of so many February discourses,

Waiting for spring, though not really certain what spring awaits in me:

O Lord, am I the silent one!

Ever ambiguous, ever sinful,

Ever mourning, ever lost,

Ever given over to the priority of doubt and to the shadow of fear;

All so immune to reason, to the testimonies of Earth and Heaven …

Drawing out from hibernation bare-sorrows still wintering inside …

Best caught in taut woolen stance the alarm of a new season’s call;

Best speaking in mere dumbness,

Best hearing in red-drained heart:

O Lord, to be the SPOKEN ONE!

A pressure for truth, a stand-in for haunted man and nature – once –

Onto the risen highland where they, I, and saving grace may be reborn.

After Sinai

A great smoke has passed from whence Sinai slept –

feeling a February gone, and never a spring to follow,

                poised in endless hibernation:

a child’s poetic punishment, an adult’s chaotic heart-sounds,

                these beatings came neither framed in hope

                                nor written with symmetry in mind.

O Lord, am I the silent one … still …

                a prisoner of print, a slave to the season of my passing.

For all the sense          these lightnings instilled,

for all the good            commandments struck in His name,

                it might as well have been Golgotha –

                at least there was a resurrection then,

not a generation and a Moses cursed in the wilderness.

Dr. Walter Boswell

[email protected]