What Wants to Emerge

A wise man once asked a community
What wants to emerge
So I stood up and said
I do

I said give me the voice of the raven
Soaked and singing
Give me a pen and a paper notebook
that smear in the rain

Let me stand at the rubble heap and ask
What wants to emerge
The arm of Atlas mudslicked
to hold up my world

And doesn’t this life need
The muscle of a mighty god
Whose veins of gold
are rivulets always running

What wants to emerge from
The musty journals of years
From the ordinary days
and the hustle stilled at dusk

In meetings of useless chatter
I’m dreaming of the woods in autumn
The pilea’s leaves are cupping
in the direction of the tropics

What if Icarus had
Flown from that Easter tomb?
Wrapped in fluttering grave strips
to cast off the inevitable fall

And when
We are begun but dust
Yet turning back into
the entangled thicket of the cosmos

What wants to emerge then is salvation
Feathered wings
Slices of sunlight on the snow
bowls of hot soup

Skin tones richer than peach or beige
A baby all slick and wrinkled with birth-life
And each of us
to join the everlasting throng

For Jeff Eddings, who gave fifteen years of deep presence, contemplative practice, and loving leadership to Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community