It Seems a Lifetime Away
Stephen Cribari – United States

It seems a lifetime away, the desert, where
every tent opened inward, offering
olives and wine to those traveling, asking
in return only, Who are you, What’s the news,
From where have you come. In the desert we were
free and there was nothing, nothing but the wind
and the voice of God resounding everywhere,
each grain of sand a song (“Here. Here. I Am here”),
and the inescapable sun (“I Am here”),
and the inescapable thirst (“I Am here”),
yet always we found, or were found by, water
(“I Am here. I Am here. I Am always here.”)
and the wind abrading our bodies with sand,
until the choice to journey on was a prayer
and each step onward our act of worshiping.

We are a nomadic people. We exist
to know and to follow our nomadic God
who is everywhere, to journey toward a home
that we have never left (that is everywhere)
and we are faithless when we set down ourselves
with a confusion of images and signs
and tangles of arguments that require
God speak man’s language in order to be heard.
Images cannot contain the emptiness

of the desert, rhetoric cannot replace
the music of the sands moving in the wind,
and no amount of safety, riches, power
can justify our losing the poetry
of our God singing to us in the desert.