Welcome, well-come, well-cummm,
The matin bells and I will guide you inside.
You'll find us here in the still,
Still hours of each day of each year
As motionless as God's Word itself.
Our clocks have just one hand,
Measuring only the hours...
But we never see its fractional revolutions.
We depend instead on the matins
And the regularity of sparrows to our feeders.
Come, do not be ashamed of the dust and diesel
Clinging to the fibers in your skirt.
Put down your bags and brush yourself off;
We have all done the same at one time
Time? The word even tastes strange.
Yes, of course, tip the taxi driver, then cross
Inside and let him be on his way.
"Leave the Devil at your back," we say,
"And greet God with your hands."
With your hands in our garden,
You will learn a new language.
We sink our fingers in the soil, uproot the carrots
And forget such terms as:
restaurant, busy signal and warhead.
Here, bend down, run the blades of grass
Between your fingers. Drink the smell.
Do you sense it yet? Outside, they are so busy
With the business of God, the legislation of purity
And the craft of stained glass:
"We must converge the conceptual Christ with
The concrete reality of expansionism and its limits."
I see you read that treatise, too.
If only they could smell our grass
Between liturgy, I must admit,
There are not just a few of us in this courtyard
By the gate, our faces against the rich, humid earth,
Remembering. Reememmburrring.
Sister Martha speaks often of a tire swing
She and her brother once enjoyed.
For me, it was hard to renounce the ocean.
On the second shelf of my bookcase, I keep
A whorled shell from forty years ago on the Sound.
When I press it to the side of my head, there is
Only the rasp of leftover sand, forty-year-old grains
From a beach where my father skipped stones
And we laughed when the waves filled his shoes.
But the grass...let me tell you, you must come with us
One night when, on our knees and holding flashlights,
We gather here near the bars of the gate
And watch the desperate blades crowd in.
David Abrams was a sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed at Ft. Wainwright in Alaska, and worked as a journalist for the post paper when this poem appeared.
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