I want joy to claim you

I want to write for you the story of redemption,
maybe not the story that comes to mind at the word redemption,
but the open and flowing and liberating slow discovery of who you are,
and what all the seers and poets as far back as records reach say you are:
magnificent with being.

I want to write it with such absorbing nuance
that the dawning will leave you joy-soaked and draped over a railing, reaching
to hug and hold every passenger, here
on this long slow human locomotive.

I want joy to claim you. Imprison you. I want you bound to a joy superfluous:
oil of joy running like a benediction over your head,
penetrating joints, jaw, bones and spleen.

I want you to float in a cool green pond of joy,
with the bright moss bottom, the water striders, the minnows, tadpoles, lilies,
all like bits of mica, glistening, flashing, strobing,
jugglers of the sun’s own joy.

And speaking of minnows,
if all the joy in heaven could be crystallized in the being of a single minnow,
I would ask you to swallow it.

And if Mavis Staples, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Reed and Marty Robins,
if Cat Stevens, Mama Cass, Canned Heat and The Kinks,
if Whitman and Dickinson, Byron and Blake,
if Sappho and Sophocles, Hopkins and Hafiz,
if Lao-tzu, Brahma and the Dalai Lama,
if Christ, Buddha, Kami and the Mighty Quinn,
if the riotous souls of Rumi and the mystic children of Meister Eckhart,
if begonias and sparrows, hydrangeas and swallows,
if the great blue mists over the smoky mountains,
fields of lavender and purple sage,
all rose at once to shout your name,
I would say, please, one more time.

18 Comments

  1. Thanks Steve for share your joy today…received, invested and paid forward. I look forward to your gems of wisdom!

  2. “magnificent with being” – the riotous chaos of creation. Chesterton describes “learned men in spectacles … talking on and on of the actual things that happened – dawn and death and so on – as if they were rational and inevitable.” I think, now, that I’d rather swallow a minnow!

  3. Others have already said how wonderful this is. I am late to the party of those who have read this piece, and how poignant it is now that Aretha has left us. Perhaps she is singing these verses in a new place now. How joyous would that be to hear.

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