After Colleyville

we stand again

at the foot of the mountain of God

and everything is speaking to us

terror and beauty,

in language that is beyond

the knowable

and trickles down

like fine rain into we

who can be

cisterns of knowing,

we who have come

from the makom of

twelve springs and seventy palms

just beyond Marah,

the place of our bitterness.

 

Who we are is almost

unfathomable, we who

carry within us

whole interstitial seas,

rivers of blood,

we who are filaments of light,

our nervous systems laced

with our co-inhabitants of this earth

which is also our body -

animal, bird, bacteria

tree. We all come from the sea,

from common ancestors

improbably leaving one shore, one form

for another, we who are woven

through each other,

inhalation, exhalation,

one multi-limbed voice

 

and we who are as the trees,

pass food and knowledge

protection and warning

through our interdependent roots

and when any of us are threatened,

held hostage, violated, felled

it ripples through us all

we who are mirrors of the One in the many,

we who are the rising up from the surface

the sinking into the deep forest below,

we who are here to be the Etz Chayim

seeping in the bitter waters -

wells of medicine

a cup of blessing

 

 

Elana Klugman

1-19-22