Let the sparrow take a chair at
the Juneteeth table with Elijah,
with Godot, with the lost tribes
and the communion of saints and
the lyrics trivia-players, the
postal-truck child, the guilty one,
the noduled one, the non-prophets
and the false prophets and the
profit-takers, and the insurrectionist
authors, the beep-beep-beep backing
cement truck, the funeral home-ists,
the dead and the not-yet-dead and
the newly quickened.

Let the sparrow nest in the choir loft,
in a neighborhood of bright yellow birds
and reds, and greens, blues, grays, blacks,
weaving hymns and canticles, alive with
flutter about the white marble pillars and
vaulted ceiling and foot-washing altar,
ceremony of endless day.

Let the sparrow join every marred one,
every roughened one, every one with
fracture, stain, taint, at the midnight
tables before the McDonald’s on Broadway
below the university, above the el station,
silent as transubstantiation in summer heat,
awaiting the parade of error-makers with
the monstrance, procession of fools and
half-fools and empty vessels and buffoons
and bozos and the white wafer as the
magnet draws invisibly every atom of all
time into a single pebble at the center
of nothing.

You can hear a conversation about this poem on the Reformed Journal Podcast.

Photo by Jadon Johnson on Unsplash