Psalm for the One Who Will Not Leave the Table

O Maker, who threads morning through our shutters,  
teach me again the art of staying.

They said the feast was finished: bread gone; wine thinned to story.  
But leaving is not the only sacrament. I will sit.  
I will run my thumb along the rim of what remains:  
an oily seam, the ghost of salt, a single stubborn crumb.

Outside a crow takes up the sky like a psalm; the house exhales.  
Open the doors that want to close. Let hospitality be slow:  
hands held in the dark so the other hand remembers how to hold.

If blessing counts in leaving, let mercy count in staying:  
the stubborn charity that keeps a place warm for someone who forgot to come.  
We are taught to give and then step away; here, at the table, I learn otherwise.  
The bread remembers who it is; the cup remembers its maker.

Teach this kneeling heart to offer itself like the table: set with plain things,  
a lamp, a bowl, a place for the poor to come and learn to break.  
To open is to be opened; to offer is to accept the gift of being offered.  
So I stay, and in staying receive the impossible gift: to be grateful.

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David Anson Lee is a physician and writer whose work often explores the intersection of faith, memory and the healing arts. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he now lives in Texas, where he writes poetry and fiction grounded in gratitude, attention and the quiet movements of grace. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.