What insane thoughts
would drive me back
to gather up the crumbs of Babylon,
to face an anguished mob and cry,
'Repent!'? What shall I give
to fill the gnawing emptiness
that hollowed me and tears them still?
Go forth
and stand!
I sit
within the rock.
They come.
They come with all
the ominous impatience of
a thousand prophets.
Before our eyes they pass,
leaving anxious minds
enraptured by their frenzy.
The seven
trumpets blast
their eerie tones until our skulls
send back an echo of their own,
a message shaped from notes of wind.
Our hearts rejoice,
and with the thunder on our tongues
we open mouths to prophesy.
But truth is sealed
and no one comes to write
our babbling.
Go forth!
The wilderness
inflamed,
a jealous sun pours forth his wrath
and kindles shrubs and brush beneath
my feet. I stand
upon the mount, burning with
the fire. But oozing dampness drowns
the flame that might have warmed my heart.
I cannot go.
I will not stand among
the ashes of Gomorrah.
Go forth
and stand!
And at that
hour
I felt the ground beneath
me tremble. The mountain split
in two. I fell beneath
the weight of emptiness. The quake
had rent my heart and bared
it to my own demanding eyes.
How will I stand what I have seen?
How can I go?
They're gone.
Infuriating life was quenched
by its own fire. The song
of polished symbols lies
wrenched within my infant
memory. And all alone I sit,
with burned out hopes of seeing past
my squalid soul to find
a good excuse for man.
Go forth!
Their faded
forms now flicker through
my incoherent mind:
an exhaled breath,
a burned out match,
an earthen twitch --
diminished images
as dying seconds add
their weight to
history.
Go forth
and stand!
But still---they
left
their pencil marks on space and time,
scars to stir a crippled mind.
So now at last I stand and search
the tongue-less universe
in hope of finding in it still
the slightest whisper of
some God.
Just speak
and I will go.
--- Mahlon H.
Smith
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