”tree story” (photo by DVMcFarland)
Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside of god’s house walk with us as we climb into the next century naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.
This from the poem, “Reconciliation: a prayer,” that accompanies the lighting of the flame throughout the March-April 2018 worship series, “Listen 2.0: listening to one another.”
The poetry is from Muscogee (Creek) poet, Joy Harjo who I first heard in our back alley as part of a City of Asylum summer “Jazz Poetry” event. The words and images and rhythm of this piece affected me deeply. Like good scripture, it benefits from re-reading, so we get to work and play and grow with it all throughout this worship series. Joy Harjo grounds the work in part in the feminist wave that lifted up male and female as equal—not least in their reflections of the Divine. And though the Queer/Non-binary expressions of our humanity is absent, the poem invites the gathering of all of who we are as individuals who create and are created by the whole community of life.
Allow the listening experience to sink deep into your conscious and subconscious as you carry your story through “this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles.”