BARN DOORS
Old barn doors, gray boards creak open on groaning hinges.
Dust dances in rays of light.
Smells like leather and manure.
There’s a stirring, a portal.
Wanting to climb and hide from the world, but not
today.
Today … once more I reach through a ray of dusty light for
the worn shovel.
Work for the night is coming yet always remember the dusty
light.
Gull tracks in the sand,
and on a sliver of white shell,
as if etched by human hand,
Gull tracks again.
Tracks in the sand,
It's as if I can hear the staccato, beating, gull heart.
tracks on the shell,
Frozen in time.
How long ago,
On the history of tides,
were these tracks made?
Now,
then,
Signs written in the sand, on the infinite grains of eternity.
hidden in plain sight.
Waiting to be seen.
Truth etched in the face of God.
I am that grade school child under the house on a hot summer
day. It’s cool under here, lying on the cold red clay where Mom told me not to
go.
I am a child walking from Joyner’s Grocery. Struggling and sweating
because they scolded as I was leaving,
” Don’t mash the bread.”
So, I lift it high, holding by the tie twisted tail of the
plastic bag but my shoulders scream and fail, and I must keep stopping.
I am the skinny teenager with wire rim glasses and a spray
of freckles confused by the girls that came back to school more like women
while I blush my read haired way down the halls.
I’m the China Fleet sailor crossing the concrete bridge into
sin city of neon and street vendors and Asian hookers in hot pants,
“Hey Joe … Come ‘ere, Joe”
I am a new father cradling his son, amazed that this
purplish mass of flesh with huge dark eyes has survived the trauma of birth.
I am a son of God, resting each morning and each night in the divine light of meditation and prayer.
Breath, each breath coming home, home to the cool red clay
under the house and they call from the car,
“Scotty, where are you? We are going to the circus and we
can’t find you.”
