A Pastor's Psalm

By Patty Willis

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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.

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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)