There was no seal to be slit open.
My attention flipped over.
The scenes held in my hand.
The evening light crowned trees like a stamp.
Someone paid postage with beauty.
On one side color rose with the setting sun
and an angled glow skipped over
the folds in the fields.
Darkness tucked in for the night
under peaks of deeper greens and golds.
On the other side sparse words,
tight, lean, black ink spread apart
on white unlined space.
I am Love.
Thinking of you.
It is another Monday.
Most of the out-of-towners
have gone back to their life.
My son and I watched
a blood orange sun
disappear beyond the edge
of the earth.
Near the end
it appeared bigger
and sunk faster.
It was like the death
of my mother.
At the end we stared.
We counted her
freckles and wrinkles
and the rise and fall of her chest.
At the time it seemed like eternity,
but now the memory is a short journal entry.
It is like taking out a granite tablet
and jotting down her life in a sentence.
The beauty was fleeting
and we wanted to touch it.
There was once a big moon
as big as a get-well balloon.
There was a big sun
as big as a farewell.
© Gerald Allen Barrett and parentheticallyspeakingin3d, 2012.
Someone mentioned the phrase “in the cool of the day” recently. A poetic nerve twitched in me and my thoughts were directed to the phrases origin. It is a beautiful description set in a time when the first “hide and seek” game was taking place.
Please excuse me while I look at this scene through my limited knowledge and imagination. I am not a theologian. There is a phrase out of the Genesis account that got my attention. After Adam and Eve did the deed they “heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” and they ran and hid behind something. My first thought was what did that sound like? Did God step on a twig? Was God breathing heavy like on a power walk? Was he bending acacia trees with his pinky and slight creaks and cracks were heard? Was he whistling or humming or singing? I mean no disrespect at all I just simply want to know what the sound would be like in case God showed up. I mean, I might need to hide too or hopefully come out of hiding to walk with Him in the cool of the day.
And that’s the thing. The cool of the day seems to me to mean dawn or dusk. Maybe it was those in between hours. Between day and night where the heat wasn’t quite there yet or just started cooling off. Or maybe the “cool of the day” represents the grey, the time of day when shadows are more translucent and the color of created things are washed out. Then I think about how much us humans enjoy the daily transitions called sunrise and sunset. Don’t you look up and off into the distance when the sun plays the angles of the horizon, like God was brush stroking, His fingers dipping a prism through our atmosphere and laying out water color fantasies?
I have written of sunrises and sunsets more than once. I wonder too if God knows how transition gets our attention. Maybe the cool of the day is when we start winding down or winding up? Maybe it is a good time to listen for a twig break or a whistle or a still small voice. My pastor last week was encouraging us to take time to seek out God in the “secret places”. He started whispering what God might say to us. I couldn’t keep the tears from welling and I didn’t want to blink them out either. Could that be the sound in the cool of the day? Whether I am hiding because of some “deed” I did or simply wishing for someone with which to go for a walk I hope I am attentive in the cool of the day.
Oh Bright and Morning star arise in my heart today
and walk with me in the cool of the day.
Gerald the Writer 