Our Idols Walk Through a Mountain’s Morning
Our Idols Walk Through a Mountain’s Morning
A Poetic Reflection by Cody Edds
Part 1:
The cold air whipped against the skin of my interior lament;
The world around me noticed all things too well,
And the life of that once great city still pouring out
Like the high singing Turkish pines of a Sumerian youth.
Quick and storm-like, it rushes upon me:
Repeating, yet regressing in promised hope,
That despondent symphony of glory-departition
In the shadow-land of restoration-ruin lingering upon the earth.
And the earth, all creation, dances anxiously,
For a moment and for all of us.
This sarkic world within us, more noticed (it seems) in me,
Reflects the weather of this world without.
It sits balanced on the string between my liver and my heart,
Breathing heavy as a blur of lovers’ longing,
Peering into the pierced eyes of someone else’s reminiscence—
Eyes of spent men running wild on a small piece of living,
A living enjoyed but lost long ago, a living between two temples alone.
Part 2:
“Are you okay?” The obvious remained unspoken.
Jerusalem stood on the edge of the world,
The front porch scenery of our own immensity.
“We thought you’d be better by now.”
A chorus expectant of pre-exilic promise
Played both landlord and lawyer,
Stopping by to collect the rent,
The memories and planted flowers.
Her hand on the back of who I twice thought I wasn’t,
It went unnoticed, to be realized when once it was missing,
Slipping away to an almost empty room of other things:
A soft insignificance, lovely fingers entwined on a park bench
Beneath a sky of temporary things.
Part 3:
In every town there’s a corner unreachable.
It was almost spring, and the temple’s shadow
Remained all too short.
Jerusalem smoked a cigarette
And thumbed through a notebook
As the wind whipped my face;
A crick in the neck
Of the conscious world.
Perched with ruined walls,
My feet swung off like
Ocean waves balanced on the beaches
Of that ancient Persian Gulf—I closed my eyes.
Give the sun to the tallest buildings,
Give those leaves to the kids who drag their feet,
Give those broken branches to someone else,
Give that knowing look to the strangers who won’t show,
And hold that candle at arm’s length
In the resonant humming of the drying mouth of time.
In every town there’s a corner unreachable,
And from the time of our captive return.
I have felt myself there—
Humming along, alone at work
Or surrounded by others.
Always surrounded by her.
Part 4:
Slipping away inside, beyond the exilic walls that call for Nehemiah,
She found her younger self just the same, like a statue fixed on the sunny side
Of a cemetery, warming her hands in the heaving mid-day hollowed air
That held tightly the void between the covenant-creative recasting of Jeremiah
And embers of a king that flickered in the temple on the tongues of false prophets.
The Sabbath-world around me then reflected the past below
And the avoidance of being that so often placed itself above.
We, the apostles of a war once fought, find in others
Whispers and fickle shadows that bring to life the quietly dying inside of us.
We are untouched by progress of a pulsing kingdom and vespers of illumination.
Part 5:
It was then that Joy came bursting from beneath us
With the clarity caught in the weight of the brush.
Acceptance followed soon after.
Somewhere in the frozen ponds on the steep hills
Of winter’s last lungs singing, we saw ourselves:
A dark blue figure that danced poised.
And throbbing above Jerusalem,
A golden tender sky that dreadfully held
To its own intimate nothing
Where a few smaller lights shone forth
As specks of impervious romantic white;
The uncontrollable bells of the ocean beneath
An emerging spirit of feeble defiance stuck in the past,
And the inward pitching absence pierced without,
Refusing to reflect: immensity holding itself.
As the world thawed out and folded on the floor
By the window across the street, we felt ourselves losing
The already lost pieces of our soul;
The pieces we lost in the war,
And the pieces we’d lose every day after;
The pieces of myself nobody could ever understand, but You.
Part 6:
And so, standing in the empty interior room of time,
she thought, “I have done my good deed.
I have finished the good fight. I have fulfilled my ministry.”
With a sigh, she, an angel lighting a candle on the edge of the wind,
Walked out onto the porch one last time. Alone.
We, the apostles of a war once fought,
find in others, living whispers and fickle shadows
that both bring to life the quietly dying inside of us
—so they may kill us once more.
At least for a time, short-lived.
Cody Edds
Poet & Theologian
Photography by Caroline Greb