Where on the table are all the staves and vessels?
From whence the incense and anointing oil?
Reveal to me what heaven intended
By all these goings on.
A monument I have built of myself
Fashioned brick by brick by brick
My mud is pride and my straw vanity
But now the tower is toppled.
II.
These paradoxes and impossibilities
The dark offenses which I’ve so lightly given
Those light offenses I’ve so furiously received
What in wisdom is given and what in wisdom is withheld,
There are prayers granted and prayers half-granted,
There is that which is offered and that which is refused.
III.
Weighed, weighed, measured,
And found wanting.
IV.
O wretch that I am…
All the creeds and each of the doctrines
I’ve broken your rules; I’ve broken my own rules.
I’ve broken all the rules.
This shamefaced publican, eyes cast down,
Beating on his breast,
Should certainly have known better.
V.
Here I kneel with everyone else at the foot of the cross.
With everyone that worships You and everyone that crucifies You,
Parting Thy seamless garment or gambling for Thy seamless vesture.
I put the shoes from off my feet,
To stand on the holiest ground.
VI.
God be merciful…
He draws from His heart what only He can,
He Himself by possessing grace repossessing,
Staking His rightful claim of each and every,
And sees, in all time, all comings and all goings,
And restores at last in that day, both great and dreadful,
Great and graceful,
Everything that is gone and everything that was foregone.
VII.
The twilight is lovely, but it is cold,
I hear the hoof beats of the horsemen,
Turn back the shadow ten degrees.
VIII.
If a wishing star once rose and shone,
I beg of Hesperus and plead to Phosphorus,
Oh Lord, judge of the quick and the dead,
I pray thee– resurrect me to that holy day,
When lambs carried on the shoulders of the shepherd
Are returned into the flocks that you call your own,
Where it’s said they graze in fat pasture, quiet and peaceable.
This is my poem and my prayer.
IX.
In thy Holy Name,
X.
Amen.
Aaron Nydegger—like William Carlos William, John Stone, and other poets of the past whom he admires—practices medicine full-time and poetry part-time. He lives in Layton, Utah.
