When I was eleven and you were six, our dad died. There was a place that was part of my salvation called Dale Ridge... I think of it and the grandparents more than anyone knows, even still some forty-four years later. As I walked the hills and hollers alone (something no one in their right mind would allow for kids today), I was met not only by God but by the loud, non-verbal conversing with God.
I've been concerned about my prayer life of late, concerned with the sheer volume of living I do apart from God, how little I talk with Him. As I write this I discover how glad I am for this tension I carry between a loud non-verbal discourse and a deep desire to say things to Him.
Here is a long run-on sentence/poem about all that... and, of course, prayer.
When Eleven
If there was no such thing as sleep
I’d walk this farm as long as the bark
Up that poplar till my tread cut deep
Through the leaves and shale past the dark
Days of Daddy dying and leaving me
To love the silence of green and wind
No dumplin could work the ol’ factory
Enough to snap the rare focus pinned
To a newly sproutin chest and shoulders
Purposed to bump the butt of a .22
When leveled to the black eye and curves
Of the casual gray hare who
Knows not how much pain he takes of mine
From the jittery index squeeze I long
To repeat for the crack in the spine
And air that fails to let in right or wrong
As I walk this farm now in my sleepy
Days of gray curves and blackened eyes
Knowing the silence of green and wind, deeply
Singing the song of which I prize.
