Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Letter From Victoria

I’m the son of a man who never settled down
I left New York to find a Kansas town
I rambled far from everywhere that day
When your breath blew ’neath my wing and lifted me away

I walked up Highway 40 on my knees
A-burnin’ in your bright forbidding breeze
The old cathedral towers on the plain
No horse would drag me away, no car or train

The brothers of a new Jerusalem
Are waiting for me to be kin to them
A prayer, a meal, and sin are what we share
If we’re not family yet, we’re getting there

The harvest work was done before we came
We gleaned the fields and filled the night with games
A holy fool is welcome in this town
But a prophet gets no peace, just a thorny crown

You marked me with your arrow of desire
You pulled my brothers out of the lake of fire
Oh, get up, friends, the hour is getting late
And proclaim a jubilee at the market gate

The elders told me how it used to be
They’re sitting on the edge of eternity
If heaven is tomorrow’s earth today
In your kindness let me die, not fade away

Everyone knows everyone round here
They built the towns and watched them disappear
The city is the soul of who I am
There’s no room for you or me in dusty Bethlehem

There’s fire in the Rocky Mountain sky
In Florida the water’s getting high
The California hills are evergreen
And I’ll see my brothers there, with a God unseen.

***

Melody: "Abandoned Love," Bob Dylan

This song is a picture postcard from Kansas, a love letter to the spirit of God, and some kind of a love letter to the people, too. A young man formed by and saved in the city looks at a country town. It is an impressionist painting in words. It is a little journalistic. It is a blending of American folk lyricism and Hebrew poetry. It's literal and proverbial. It's ambiguous. It's definitely ambivalent. Maybe it's visionary, but I don't want to be bragging about things in which I have no right to boast. Most likely it's honest.

2 comments:

  1. I love love letters to my Kansas people, to and from my brothers in Christ.:-)

    Beautiful psalm, Brother.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Excellent Psalm brother Anthony! may God bless you.

    Sincerely,

    Br. Reynaldo

    ReplyDelete