Charisms

                   I

Hey, Lord, I’m dancing – 
 
not like a dervish, 
not like the whirling 
priestess in the aisle, but hey, 
my feet are off the ground. 
 
Here is my Sunday 
sacrifice.  O Lord, accept 
these offered gestures 
     and forgive me this – 
 
that when I speak in tongues 
I often whisper. 

                  II 

We danced before You – 
clattered out our praise and 
laughed for joy 
and sang in unknown tongues. 
 
And were we filled with You? 
Was this Your strength and power? 
 
O, still small Voice, 
sudden You came 
and gifted us 
 
a weight of silence. We 

                 III

for Kwame Nkame – whoever, wherever you are

A vision came
of figures on an open plain
and one among them – separate.
 
We prayed together as we watched you walk
across the wide land, in the waist-high grass
from left to right
(was that from West to East?)
We also, through those watches of the night
and all the distance of those days
wondered about your children
and your wife – then
what inspired
and freed you to return.
 
For, as the Spirit gave us utterance –
we dared believe – we saw you then
walking the other way, from right to left,
(and so from East to West?)
and said our Alleluia and Amen.

Originally presented as three separate pieces in Lent Poems and Found Poems.

I reworked the third section after my conversation with Rebecca Watts in 2022, and began to see the three parts as a whole.

The original inspiration came from reading Kei Miller’s Speaking in Tongues, which includes the phrase  “always I am on the outskirts”.  It seems to me that those of us who have been on the inskirts don’t often do a very good job of explaining or even describing what’s going on.  So I offer three aspects of my own experience.