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By Patty Willis My heart opened wide yesterday, Thanks be to God cracking from the force of my gifts aligning with your urgings. Each time this happens I wake the next day in wonder at how connections like arteries and vessels can be rerouted until they flow unhampered to and from the heart bursting out with such energy at first and then slowing as horses do, after a sprint as runners do—bending forward, hands on lower legs, and then in a split second they remember that big board with their name and time recorded for everyone to see. We watch from our comfortable chairs: athletes victorious, jumping, no longer tired, a second wind that carries them in a victory lap around the field. But who deserves our thunderous praise, our feet slapping the bare stone? We learn to be silent, tears coming to our eyes. Even when we are alone, we’ve lost the habit of falling to our knees. My heart broke open when I saw them arriving: familiar people slipping into back rows, names forgotten but not to You. Thirty minutes before, they had heard a call to come not bothering to comb their hair or iron a shirt: Come as you are, You said. You will be fed. Their hunger is the thread that holds my Sabbath like the fence around a medicine wheel upon which we can tie our hopes. Our hunger satiated at last by the wide view, the wind moving clouds, the mountainsides once covered in buffalo herds at last seem hospitable for their return. Pray for us, we say to the stranger next to us as if we each hold a piece of the puzzle. All put together we would become the night sky that waits above the clouds for us to roll out our sleeping bags and lie back, each star a heart asunder. Thanks be to God. Rev. Patty Willis is a minister, writer, artist and translator based in Arizona. She has also been active in immigration justice and reconciliation between white settler descendants and indigenous people.
Patty's other work on Foreshadow: Pumping Station in the Desert (Poetry, July 2021) Openings (Poetry, May 2023)
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