Mountain Laid Low
This rain falls cold, hard, and somehow slow.
This is not the summer’s cloudbursts and flash flood warnings recognized, something to brace for, something intense to be endured with an end to be celebrated. These showers don’t promise the drama of a story arc. These showers fall like a fact, like an unfortunate new reality; a return of the old chill that has never quite left my bones.
Thunder rolls and breaks over the distant mountains like relationships already nearing expiration, hopes born, churned, and destroyed amid much light and fury, but no heat; delivered, yes, but delivered only to death. To be warm again, for the first time, with no fear of the cold deposited, trapped in my marrow; to be cradled, if not in solidity, then at least in hope – at least, at last, finally, at the end of myself -at least, let there be hope. To finally, truly know, with no effort necessary, no suspension of disbelief, with no exercise in faith required, that I’m not broken, that I belong, that I won’t ever have to leave.
But I guess that’s why good, needful country folk talked about, sang about, and got real excited about the “glory land” and the “sweet by and by” and the “land where we’ll never grow old”. Of course, I’ve left behind such strange, literal ideas about heavenly “streets of gold”. The “on Earth as it is in heaven” mission reads more true, makes more sense. I don’t believe in “mansions just over the hilltop”, but I don’t believe in this place either. Folks like to talk about how important or not it is that you and I believe in God; but on days like this, all of these years of days, it sometimes seems it might be more important to believe God believes in me.
If at least I hadn’t come here, I would still have hope that there is something better, something better than a sky of brokenness and tears and this heavy, ancient fact of a rain that floods and drowns, rather than quenches, the prayed for rain that does the parched ground no good. From here, the pinhole of the past shines like a hope absent from the small, dark canvas of the future.
The showers fall into the night. The night falls into me.
– PreetamDas Kirtana
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