Poem For The Sunday Lectionary (Lent 1, Yr. A, 2020)

WILDERNESS
(Matthew 4: 1-11)

How few of us know wilderness,
here in these towns, sprawling cities,
the gray of their streets,
green shrunk down to
dots of lawn, patches of park,
the remnant trees silent
in their memories of an earth
mourning its lost forests
as Rachel would mourn for her children.

Perhaps this is wilderness: this loss
of wild nature, its replacement by
concrete and asphalt and steel,
its thinning rivers, its sickened oceans,
its creatures dwindling like the leaves
of a disease-stricken tree.

Perhaps this wilderness is where
the Christ must come today:
into this new human solitude,
this place slowly being emptied
of all life not our own,
this place where even God
becomes harder to find,
our relationship to the divine
put under hard pressure,
our temptation to be ourselves
the only god we will serve,
tempted to pretend we are invulnerable.

O Holy One, come into this,
our self-made wilderness.
Come be with us in the loneliness of
our cell phones and computers,
come be with us in our hunger
for the meaning of our life,
come into the wasteland we
are making of the earth,
this kingdom of our arrogance where
we so often forget the life-giving love of God.

O Holy One, help us here,
before this wilderness becomes
one we do not
know how to leave.

^{Copyright ©2020 by Andrew King}

Poem For An Endangered Planet

(On the occasion of the 2019 U.N. Climate Change Summit)

SCRIPTURE FOR THE DECREATION

Let the white bear hunt a new home.
Its home hold no memory of place.
Let the swelling bellies of oceans sink shoreline
in wild jaws of hurricaned bays.
While hurt whales weep for the coral collapsing
like dust.

Let burning eyes fix on red embers of forests.
The black soil abandon scarred fields.
Let heated plains harden like crusts of old bread
and blossoms cry out for the bees.
While hope fails in houses on highways surrendered
to dust.

Let the meltwater mountains go numb in their nakedness.
Let wind wail the dirges for earth.
In the snap of the bones of the shattering ice sheets
let listeners at last learn the words.
While birds ask of butterflies stricken, directionless
as dust.

Then let those who can, when rain pounds like punches
and marshes march into city streets
to meet rivers gray with the gathered grief,
stagger from stunned vehicles,
cross the drowned doorsteps
and recall, as the split wood its tree,
that they are dust.

^{Copyright ©2019 by Andrew King}