Currants from Corinth

Speak in tongues,
utter from angel lips,
murmur from man’s mouth.
Let your harp
cut and carp,
strut with strings.
Echo with your gong
Pierce with your pipe
Singe with your sound.
Muse without music,
Lilt without love,
Sear with sheer pitch,
Resound with din,
Pound.
Prophesy, fair one.
Crack all mysteries,
Sack all books,
Crush all mountains,
Mash them aside
with wiley will,
with fractioned faith.
Fling off, doff, your wealth,
Pile the poor with monies.
Your house stands bare,
a coffin of bones,
alone
without love.

Love is patient
Love is kind,
envy-less
boast-less,
unpumped with airy pride.
Unpeeled, it pervades,
Deals in substance.
Secure, it sucks no blood.
Love relishes in right,
Shoots blanks at felonies.
It blots out the page
of Wrongs,
won’t demand to damn.
It erodes the record of villainy.
Blithely, forgets how to blame,
minds only what is good.
Seeks past itself,
wrathless melts,
prideless, dights,
dignifies.

It flees the dark,
Comes out of hiding,
shamelessly sides
with truth.
It preserves and wards,
serves.

It trembles with trust,
beyond proof,
beyond pain,
past doubt.
It’s high on hope,
perduring despair.
It walks both oasis
and waste.

It cheats Death.

Where tongues tease –
they’ll peter out,
teeter,
ceasing all sound.
Lungs expire,
dwindle.
Fickle flames,
once kindled,
smoulder.
The wisdom,
once filling,
now fails and fades.

We know but bits,
the chaff of ages.
The wind blows dust
away.
You soothesay tomorrow,
but the tale will turn,
wind another way.

One-hearted,
Undepleted
in grown completion,
the child’s clamor
changes to conjugal Song.

The child whines,
wallows in wants –
mounts on its demands.
Once grown, unalone,
the suckling sighs,
needs no milk,
milks life back into man.
The young thing grows,
groans in pain,
goes gallant in love,
and grand.
Seeing, she
gains face.
Caught in corridors
of mirrors,
he fights for unmirrored sight.
The narcissist annihilates,
slips herself in shards
of shiny glass,
reflections estranged,
manged,
cracked.
Set free,
her self sees face to face.
She knows bits,
He knows parts.
Their vision reaches, split.
Eyes strain to see and know.
We love in part,
We see all split.
Love will defeat
all fracture.

The giver of life,
maker of face,
knows fully our fibers,
threads them through.
We’re fully seen, fully loved.
One day we’ll fully know.


Inspired by 1 Corinthians 13