You have stood there for generations,
palms outstretched, awaiting a blessing.
I have watched you for generations
from across this murky river, as our cloaks become tattered
from wind, rain, and too much sun.
Let us stand together in the shade of the quiet oak.
May all the children of Abraham find sustenance at this confluence
of battered roads. And learn to sustain others too, rather than
to disdain, and deny, in the ochre twilight
as the chariot revolves over the city, watching without ceasing
you and me and them.
We are one without weapons before the shrike-radiance
of the living Most High, to learn to breathe without denial, to refuse the poison fumes of the altercators. To run at one with the outgushing
of the waters that form and marry the marred plains into burgeoning
fields of wisdom to people the living towns with warmth, and
glad light, unobstructed but weaving ever more intricate patterns
of beauty, of love, of grace, of the sublime, on a darkling plain
that none called home.