Crushed Pearl; Untitled

Crushed Pearl

We will be gone soon enough from this place,
won't we Magdalena, so settle me down, help me
keep but one fire stirred and supplied, here by my side.
Amplify these hours into one reduced
all into this one, and then the next the same
until there is only now; nothing outside this moment,
now, and the totality is here in a rotted shell.
Here our lives form and in a grain of sand have turned
into a pearl, round and alone.
Not unhappy, not ever all contained in us
are these simple times together when we work and play,
build up and tear down, sit up all night pondering or
lay down before we ought,
complete the rout of task and never end our wanderings,
not all can be handled, even if gently as a small bird
in kind hands. All is beheld, though, and may always be;
God is All in All.

Pretend you are a man who like an oyster lost his life
to a stray grain of sand; what would it mean to die for some dirt even if it
turned you to pearl?
Blessed are those, says Jesus for they have sold their
fields and their home,
all that they have worked so hard for,
to own this one crushed pearl.

[Untitled]

The wisdom of the daylight hours has no words,
the night not a sentence for all its experience.
Day speaks to night without a voice,
knows a night without answer,
and we are left discoursing ceaselessly of both.

That we might say with Thomas--
show me to this man,
the man who has not one word left.

Hear whispered in our ears the languagelessness
of corn tassles lowering their gift upon silk.
Loneliness matured into compassion complete,
desires lost on the wind like milkweed seed
soaring on the slightest breeze--
falling into silence.
These wordless psalms drop us to our knees
and raise us back up again.

Mark Mitchell worked as a graphic artist with New Orient Media, an audio-visual production corporation at the time this poem appeared. His poems have been published in Brethren Life and Thought.