A Monk With No God
A Monk with No God
I stagger through a monastery built of salt,
pillars bleeding,
stone tasting of distant rain.
A candle hisses in a goblet of wine;
the prayer I utter drowns
before it is named.
My tongue, labyrinth of burnt honeycombs,
bees crawl up my sleeves
whispering God’s lost syllable.
I sit, bone and garment stitched by centuries of breath,
waiting for the sky
to unbutton its mouth,
for lightning to write a saint in my shadow.
Silence thick as broth;
ten thousand invisible bells ringing inside it.
God a rumor behind the wallpaper.
God a tremor of light in a puddle of skull.
Night arrives hunchbacked, pockets full of prayer-seeds
moulding dark and yearning.
My heart, a suitcase without a destination,
lined with hot coals.
I kneel to the swarm of silence,
to the wind that carves tongues from my ribs.
I beg the darkness: invent me a fragment of meaning
as a star invents distance by burning.
Morning: absence sits across from me
next to the chipped mug.
I gather my hands around it, inventing warmth.
Names stiffen in the air,
everything unspoken,
soft as the crown of a newborn’s head
A patch of sunlight retreats from the floorboards.
When you left, or God left, or was never here,
it pooled in the corner,
a feral luminescence licking at dust.
I open the cupboards:
prayer an unopened jar,
fasting the ache behind my knees.
Today a stray dog chases its shadow
in the leaf-patterned yard,
its hunger more honest than sanctification.
I want to ask the wind what forgiveness costs
when the one to forgive is a rumor
and the rumor keeps its coat buttoned shut.
Absence creeps into the folds of my shirt,
makes a monastery of my ribcage.
I endure this clarity unadorned.
If light must come, let it be through loss,
filling the cracks between yesterday and what might burn.
I count nights by tracing veins on my hands,
each blue river a memory,
each bend a prayer unspoken.
My knees hold more secrets than any scripture,
each crease the whisper of a promise never kept.
I remember the taste of mercy:
old bread, winter on a child’s teeth.
No icons here -
only the shadow that falls when hope closes its eyes.
No God listens behind these walls,
only an old coat heavy with lost confessions,
the ache in my back time teaches.
Sorrow does not heal; it only makes holy.
Tears gather in crypts behind my eyelids,
sometimes spilling, sometimes freezing,
sometimes making bread rise softer,
sometimes teaching salt it can be sweet.
I light a candle for each doubt;
the flame bends, wanting to become rain,
knowing its journey is to be extinguished,
knowing the world most in the instant it fades.
A monk with no God prays anyway,
to the wound, to the silence,
to the hands that trembled before they clung to faith.
Even absence fingerprints the heart.
Devotion is grief’s shape
when no one watches.
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