The Theologians #4:
the library opening

during the summer
we brought the books over one by one.
as any librarian, scholar or avid reader
will tell you there is a certain danger
on transporting books in this manner.

so on the third day, when the books
began to wake up, sneeze off their
dust and stretch their spines, none
of us were really surprised.

I still have the teeth marks from where
a Holy Bible bit my ankle, others can
tell you about herding dictionaries into
their pins, of watching boxes
of archive material form a marching band.

I humored them as best i could,
i sang to the bibles, asked the commentaries to please play nicely
with each other and scolded
more than one theological text that insisted
on picking fights with it's neighbors.

but in the end,
we just sat and listened
as the books demanded attention,
like children at the fair,
and eventually settled into a
restless sleep.

A Prayer for Days End

Listen, all of you,
tonight children cry, tiny fists protesting
heaven, mouths crying for the honey-sweet
milk of a mothers breast.

coyotes walk in the suburbs,
chasing the tale-tell story of a lost sent,
of a history lost to pavement and homes
that keep their stories bordered by four walls

on the air is a slight bite,
a wildness of possibility and probability,
of our own stories
of death and dying and rising and dying
again

the horizon ends the day with fading light
but even night is not empty, it is filled
with living things, lost things and
found things

and us,
drowning in a world that teems with
the presence of God,
we have only those words of our heart,
staggered and stumbling
etched on paper and hearts and tongues
and hopes

sometimes the only prayer we have
is this:
 a mouth open, a finger crossed,
the night before us and our good shoes
tied tight.

Copyright, Jason Derr.
All rights reserved by author.