Christopher Haywood Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

This poem charts a journey of God's public communication with humanity. The ultimate form of divine communication is not a loud command from the sky, but the willingness to experience human vulnerability and silence.

Through Cheap Clay Pots

the sky wasn’t a loudspeaker.
not a stage curtain either, just blue linen
and a lot of empty room where people breathed.
but there were days the quiet got snapped.
like a thread.
the infinite trying to squeeze through a pinhole
just to stitch some wandering, half-drunk tribes back into place.

first time? it tasted like gravel in the throat.
at Sinai.
the mountain literally buckled.
imagine a voice trying so hard not to crush you,
granite splintering under too much weight.
ten sharp lines dropped on a crowd that was sweating,
pulling dirty cloaks over their ears, screaming:
stop. let the guy speak instead.
this sky-noise is killing us.
and God? just nodded in the black.
fine. I’ll whisper through cheap clay pots from now on.

then the street-corner poetry years.
the ugly, desperate years.
the voice didn’t drop from the stars—
it stole Isaiah’s bad cough.
it used Jeremiah’s ruined vocal cords.
Ezekiel chewing on dust.
screaming in the market about rotten bread and overpriced stones.
didn’t sound like a king.
sounded like a dad under a yellow porch light at 3 AM
staring at the driveway,
knowing the kid lied about where they went.

then that day by the river. muddy water.
people washing off their grime.
no lightning.
just the sky ripping open like an old zip-up hoodie.
and the voice sounded... heavy.
not angry. just weirdly proud.
that one’s mine, it said to the crowd.
like a mom showing off a wrinkled, ugly baby in the grocery aisle.
couldn't keep the secret inside the house anymore.
had to tell the neighbors.

the longest speech was just... skin.
the voice stopped rattling the hills because it got lungs.
sat on dead grass. joked about mustard seeds.
complained that the well-water was warm at noon.
sighed when his friends fell asleep in the dirt.
then the iron went through the wood.
that was the loudest sermon.
not written with fire on rock,
but walked out in cheap sandals through the dust.
the biggest thing the mouth of the universe ever said
was learning how to bleed with the rest of us.

now? just the after-ring.
the old speeches tucked into moldy library books.
the sky went back to being quiet and big.
but sometimes, when the wind hits the telephone wires,
or a room drops its noise all at once,
you catch the ghost of it.
like someone clearing their throat in the next room.
trying to tell you they’re still there.
and that they never really wanted to shout anyway.

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