Jehovah Jireh

Tonight I find myself alone:

notebook open, the smell of citronella burning, and a choir of cicadas chirping 

like they always do in August. 

Maybe it’s the solitude of a midsummer night dreamer but the only thing I want to do

is pen to words all the sharp turns

that life has thrown at me: 

like the evening we sat together

round a square table

eating out of Chinese food containers

fortune cookies cracked 

only to find that someone forgot to fill them with a future. 

In times like this life does not ask but tells:

it does not give but takes. 

And does it make me the fool for believing that maybe I just need to be told?

That maybe I need to loosen up my full-throttle grip clenched fist fingertips fit pressed press pressing into palms it’s mine give me time not this my precious no! 

Let it go. I don’t have control. 

If I, with open hands, were 

to unpocket these color-swirl 

marbles that look so perfect as I turn them over against the dimly lit sky of my night ramblings 

maybe he would send me pearls 

that would not reveal themselves to be just glass 

but would grow only more lovely when truth hit my windowsill.

But still

why is it that an unseen future has the power to turn pain to paranoia--to send me on a panicked rant in which I end up living down the street from my parents in a studio apartment with seventeen cats?

What is it about the unknown that makes me feel

unknown?

Abandoned

by the one who created me but who didn’t exactly take the time 

to perfectly create the rhyming

of my life’s poetry--

like I begin in iambs then

my stanza ends.

Does the Author of Life have a plan

for the rest of his poem?

Will it all come full circle in time with a divine breath of irony

to prove that my fears are false and my future is full

and that I am not alone

and that I am known

and that I am known

and that I know that I am loved by the Eternal Poet.

How deep the Father’s love for us! How vast beyond all measure!

To live in peace would be an awfully great adventure. 

I will continue on in this free verse

taking what beauty rhyme and meter grant to me but believing that there exists love in white space-- 

that the great expanses between words and movement

are just moments to reflect 

on what’s been said and what’s been done

and not moments to worry of what will be

Be still and know that he is God.