7

Photo by Ben Padgett

Sooner or later,

you'll figure out

that my vocabulary

is very limited.

   The list of words I know

   to be true – Or is it that

   I NEED them to be true? –

   is quite brief.

   Let's see... there's:

Grace – the truest of all truths,

never settling for the limitations

of how we experience it

or want it to be. 

Love – the deepest of all truths,

holding us more tenderly

than we ever imagined

when it’s whole;

hurting us almost more deeply

than we can stand

when it’s broken. 

Forgiveness – the richest of all truths,

covering even the grandest failure,

not with denial, but reprieve. 

Mercy – the softest of all truths,

tempering justice into

an ending bearable,

no matter how bleakly

our story begins.

Hope – the largest of all truths,

opening doors and windows,

raising suns after all possibility

has been exhausted. 

Faith – the most mysterious of all truths,

the mortar spanning

the vast expanse between

tiny bricks of understanding. 

Trust – the hardest of all truths,

holding betrayal in a glove

of unimaginable possibility. 

      These seven may be it.

      Everything else is

      merely experiential riff

      in their presence or absence;

   just verbal sketches

   from the storm of sitting

   too near the tracks

   when they pass through. 

When I find myself in stories

where all seven of these are AWOL,

I just sing into the morning,  

or  whistle throughout the night,

or cry, or pray until at least

one of them shows up,

believing that the one(s)

to arrive are the necessary one(s)

for the transformation

of today’s pain and suffering. 

© 2016 Todd Jenkins