a single dream

A single dream
can last
forever. Here,
your only
companion
is the patient
light that makes
you into
a constant,
living
devotion.

----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

feast and fidelity

Everyone here is waiting
for the audacious touch
of your fire. Our only
words are songs.
We hear your longing
and return it,
a courageous trust,
a fidelity,
a proclamation,
a feast.
We are ready
for your unruly
tenderness. We beg
for the dangerous
encounter we were
born to affirm.
Somewhere, someone
is already remembering
the child's obedient
poverty, the wild
and willing freedom
every birth invites.

-----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

one edge of things

This part of the woods is unfamiliar. Its edge is the kind of place that looks like it’s going to open up into a strange city, with light the color of another world entirely. I wonder if you know what I mean. I can remember another such place, a woods of pine trees in symmetry and then---expansion. Or what felt like it was going to be. In reality a little clearing existed there, and within it a small grotto that seemed to belong in a fairy tale. I could sometimes hear water running there if I paid attention and we weren’t in the middle of a dry spell.

The edges of this place claim a part of my soul that is afraid to step into its light. I’ve been told there is a river just beyond the sweep of trees. Not a city but running water, alive and wild. Dizzy with imagined possibility, I hang around in hiking boots, feet clad in leather watertight and unsuitable for toeing the edges of rivers. I keep thinking I’ll go beyond the place where I always stop, someday. I’ll just keep walking over the little ridge and there will be the moving water that will tell me something I’ve always needed to know. It will want me to learn its language. It won’t be scared, even though I might be. I’ll be wearing tough-girl Tevas and I will sit on the bank of the river and let my feet find the flowing coolness below me. I’ll sit there with the eddies of the river around my toes and the tops of my feet, remembering the pine-woods grotto and its delicate underwater voice, tracing new places in clay. 

the rhetoric of silence

The burning cure
of sacramental encounter
is calling me out
of my stillness.
The rhetoric of silence
is teaching me how
to ask, how to
worship. How to
confess the petty
troubles of my
willingness. How,
finally, to remain,
despite the pull
of the world's
safe and stifling
strangeness.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

approaching the blaze

Remembering
the shy dream
of your Presence,
I savor a tender
spinning, which
keeps your obscurity
distant, your response
an imagined
shiver. How can I
approach the abiding
blaze of your Body?
Only in a secret
life of abandonment
and love. Only the
speechless for-
ever of your
absence can make
me whole.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

written without words

The humble star

you point to

insists on 

revelation.

Free and empty,

my little pilgrim’s

heart celebrates its

shine and what

it shows us:

a family, a seed,

a silent prophet

abiding in the desert;

a herald, bold and holy,

a taste of something

original and wild,

written without words across a living sky.

©Laura Sorrells 2014

all rights reserved

something asking

Something fierce
and patient
is asking for
my story.
Only the secret
you keep
can open its
longing into
the claiming
promise your
stillness teaches
me to need.

©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

stirring into

All the busy servants
of your work
are trembling and silent
here in the bloom
of your strange blessing.
Everywhere, the stories
you sent us
are stirring into
a kind of gentle
consummation. Do you
recognize my giddy
heart? Can you
discern how its bones
have made a
spectacle of
waiting? All along
the way you've
talked and burned.
My silence is
the history of adoration,
the secret genius
of losing, a swoon
of thyme and thunderstorm,
the way the mountain smells
as you climb it.
----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved

only

My little songs of sorrow
seek the dreams
your silent language
brings me.
No consolation,
no passion,
no murmurs of discernment
in the healing rain.
Only the impossible
whispers of your
heart, impoverished
and empty,
wordless and deep
in the redemptive
determination of
your love.

----©Laura Sorrells 2014
all rights reserved