Through the glass: shadow and your face, your hand—
healed, the way it reached out that last time before
you withdrew it and turned your back on me, on us.
My hand shakes. The glass moves. The scene shifts
and it comes back, the way the wind caught
the corner of your coat as if to implore you
to make a different choice. It came to me,
that wind. It stirs through the ages.
I am old now, as before.
The light is changing.

So many things still I do not know.
Or can scarcely remember, even from the slice of time,
this slender trajectory that seems a replication. 

To know what I do not know. To be allowed 
to touch the things I do, to be given the strength
I once had to call forth the winds to stir, to make
whole and complete the skies in you, to set
the fallen stars spinning and to see life
in your eyes, to feel the river running
through you. To see your sight
restored so you might rightly see
and see me clearly. Night falls now
on the dawn of time. Life fades.

So many things still you do not know.
Or can scarcely remember, not caring to, I know. 
Thick the veil you dropped, heavy the chains.

Once I wanted only to defend my claim, to clear
my name, to shout it loud, from the mountaintops: 
all the falsehoods you formed of me, now or then.
Here, now, it is the little things—the way you made me
an enemy of faith, fortitude, foundations, and family,
when in truth these four of five I never had I held
for you by taking the fifth I have been granted 
in full measure, by applying freedom aligned 
with the winds that move all things to reveal
how it was not in truth any external enemy
but only the choices made, the places chosen
by you to lie down and rise up, the misaligned
alliances and what was so fickly
flung away and forfeited.

So many things still we have not said. 
All the echoes, all the electric jolts, all the energy
applied and all the life between us still denied. 

I do not care for this world and all who prey
upon its inhabitants, who turn on those who came
to serve in solitude. Above all else, I abhor the silence
of those who do have eyes to see and choose, willfully,
to turn their backs. And I cannot stand the sound
of the flap, flap, flap of fine clothes whipping wild
in a gracious wind and the unacknowledgement.
But you know this already, yes? And enjoy it, 
do you not? And while you may like the way
I weep endlessly, still you do not see
how God has used my tears for good
for all you hold so dear. 
Do you know what
you know?

*

The shadows shift to reveal to me all the truths
you did not see: how you thought me disillusioned,
without comprehending the truth of what this says
of you and how you held on to illusory world you made,
sacrificing without a thought the color and the clarity,
the way we were cut from a cloth of diamond light, then
cast us, like the roll of weighted dice, into an abyss.
To gamble with my life is one thing. To harm the other,
an innocent, is quite another. What for and for what? 
Because I had eyes to see and held fast to freedom
from tyranny, insisted upon true integrity and
chose love, even at the cost of a light
dispersed into a sky of stars,
the shattering of me.

Where are you, I wonder? Still examining? Still trying
to prove it cannot be because it has not been written
in a book? Still suspended in disbelief that love
or freedom could achieve such a thing, could
move mountains even? Could change the river
running red? This is the revelation of a mystery!
Or are you, as all the others suggest, simply
at home with your judgments, a far cry from reality,
sittin there seeing me through some glass dimly:
as misguided and lost, though here I am, living
faithful to my call and found; as messy
and dirty, though my heart and my home
have been clean and pure; as lazy
and lacking, though my tireless devotion
has been rewarded with this
abundant life, sans you.

But there is no proof, and in this you are
correct—satisfied, perhaps, that you will have
lived and died and got it right, though from such
a slim perspective. Let the record show there is
no evidence, only circumstantial dots that form
a possibility. Let the record show too, then, that I
fulfilled my part and, dot by dot, performed
my duty to devotion for light, for life, for love. 
There is yet another circle outside the one
you see as incomplete, and it holds us—
we who walk in shadow. It pulls us, draws us
quickly toward the light. Blind to it though we
may be, it reveals life's ever-changing mystery
and showers us with a bouquet of stars
that fell or were flung far afield.

So, for now, there we are: two shadows
caught up in the the light of day. Another morning
born. Will we drink not only to life but also of it?
Or will we merely see the shadows, perplexed
and trapped by their seeming complexity?
I put down this glass and will drink no more
from the cup of limitation. See what you will
in what is reflected, in all that has been projected
upon me with such ferocity. Of course
I care and know, too, all the things you 
think impossible for me to know. 
I have nothing to prove. Only
another journey here to make
this fine day, to draw closer
to a light that fades.