when they put us to the sword,
they clapped their hands and
raised a joyous shout:

our lord, they cried, is king
over all the earth;
let us sing to the most high,
the one who subjects peoples to our will
and lays nations down at our feet.

oh yes, we know this song,
we sang it once ourselves, though
at the time we thought
it was a victory cry or a
psalm of deliverance, or maybe
a kind of crazy, passionate
love poem.

let them sing their songs –
when their new lover moves on
and their cities have been
laid to waste,
they’ll realize all too soon
that their hymn of praise
to the most high
was really a cry of terror, or
a song of fealty to
the neighborhood bully,
or maybe it was just the terms
of their surrender.

astonishing how one’s world can be
ripped asunder with brutal efficiency:
tectonic plates shift less than a millimeter
and mountains crumble to the ground;
a ripple widens ever so gently
in the midst of the waters and
soon families, homes, whole nations
are washed to the sea.

yet far from the surface destruction,
somewhere deep inside, there are waters
even the mightiest elements cannot touch:
a river that flows freely yet is never perturbed,
its surface as glassy and silent
as the dead of night.

come visit this holiest of holy places,
when the turbulence becomes too much
for you to bear, let these waters be your refuge,
your stronghold so gloriously insulated
against the terror and disquiet.

here is where all clamor ceases, all winds
are calmed, all nations disarmed;
here you may dive deeper and deeper
into the waters yet never go under;
here the howling of gale force winds
sounds like nothing more than
the most imperceptible whisper
breezing softly through
your soul.

i’m working on a new song,
quite frankly i’ve had it
with the empty prayers
and false offerings, the
sycophantic hymns of praise,
the endless moans of
self-pity, the endless anthems
to victimhood.

my new song came to me
when i least expected it,
it started as a simple song,
just a quiet recounting with
nothing held back and
the more i sang the more
i recognized words still
gestating, patiently waiting
to be born out of my
most authentic self.

i know i’ve sung fancier
songs to you in the past,
but i’m thinking you’ll
like this one best.
it’s not my most eloquent,
but it is my truth and
haven’t you told me
repeatedly that’s all
you’ve ever really
asked of me?