God’s Voice is Between the Sounds

It’s the New Year

what should be near and dear

just isn’t there.

Such a bittersweet time of gain and loss,

apples with honey,  anchovies in sour cream,

all our sweet hopes and nullified aspirations,

all our loves and failed infatuations

float downriver,  melts into an unmoved sky,

and there is where we look for God.

 We might know God as we enter heaven,

might know Her even in our transmigrations,

but for now, She’s up to the sum of our imaginations.

God’s voice is between the sounds

of the slight shiver of the restive leaves, and

the slap splash of sockeye in this still scene

of a languid pool of evening.

In the distance, swift tires go Ummmm…

a meditation of tires, quaking the atmosphere

as we become aware in lotus yoga style.

Journeys into discovering repentance,

to hope for atonement by our compassionate God,

who decides life and death of all,

an eternal widow in infinity, She cries,

thinking back of what might have been…

     Had we only done that one last thing…

The further shore’s trees stay still,

watchers of time and bearer of years,

each new ring of their growth is a sign

if the years were lean or Kelly Green,

catching the essence of our voice,

an echo of a moment within a wooden moment,

a record of our trails and trials,

an anagram of our lives.

     Reaching for the sky, kicks an old woman on a swing,

‘Higher, Higher!’ She shouts with a little girl’s glee.

A hope that we all wish to conjure, closer, closer!

God!   Our hearts lean towards Your love.

But stark reality gets its way.

   A Kaddish of two hundred thousand souls

   mixes with the spices of this Sabbath’s eve.

Patterns that we can hardly perceive

lie in the fallen pink and yellow leaves,

a pointillist picture of us turning trees,

we’ve become red leaf and seed, and

as if children, we seem to say,

“Look at me!  Look at me!”

Letting go, to find Her, amidst the forest floor,

falling leaves into the river which runs on and on,

an eternal flow of who we are.