By and By
By and By
Deborah J. Shore
The LORD will be the light in her midst;
He will also be her storm
and both at once—nothing so radiant
as the clouds’ gilded grey,
the pockets of fanning rays.
She’ll be caught in the glowing
bubble of a raindrop’s shadow on the window.
Sun through a hard, straight afternoon rain
waters the earth in electric watts.
But rain at the slant’s the most comforting rhythm
and mostly comes when the sun is hidden.
The cracking sky first brought the gift of fire.
So, yes, the LORD will be her sun
and will also be her storm—
He who taught my trees how to dervish and roar
and how to find their feet in the after,
how to stand heavy and stunned in their wet socks
surrounded by His ozone-saturated exhale.
Feeling cleansed but bone-pale, they’re unable
to bend to count what’s broken off them.
The many-stormed are okay
with the Gardener binding
the young, torqued branch in a brace—
its holy socket newly initiated—
while they let their brittle and blotchy bits fall away.
The tallest crowns are often messy, even singed,
a cautionary testament.
Some days hold pleasure in waves
that surge and swish but never break—
a rustling, sibilant, buoyant cascade.
The LORD will be her sun
but not only a high noon blue with an elm for shade.
He also comes stealing through haze to transport to flame
cabochons threaded on the white pine’s spikes
or settles in
golden at my side
in that familiar fading—
thematic of my life—
which is at once the sun’s corresponding rise.
My favorite inner bright, pilot of my nights,
will then anoint the head
with visible spectrums of light.
The LORD will be her sun,
and the heat of His beaming—
what many had deemed a mirage—
is in fact the silky liquid we had desired,
its horizon resplendent with colorful flames
and crystalline down to the deep sea’s bed.
There all tumult stills,
but weirdness scuttles and slithers
and darts before its grasped
like in half the worthy thoughts a person’s ever had.
The underpinning of praise reflects and refracts
without distortion. But though the substance is seamless,
each mouth and instrument, every clap or dance, strikes
across a different facet as of a momentarily cut expanse
and then turns, a streak of lightning, to seek a jewel again.
This is just the surface
of blessedness.
Deborah J. Shore
Poet
Deborah has won poetry competitions at the Anglican Theological Review and the Alsop Review and has published in Christian Century, Christianity & Literature, and Relief Journal among others.
Photography by Daniel Olah