Three Visitors
We have gathered today
Robbed of words
At a time that calls for some speech
To fill the silence
A time that calls in the heart,
Saying that we must try to speak now
Of the unspeakable
We force ourselves
Almost blind with pain
To gaze into a future
Where the fog of grief
Hides all horizon.
Words flee us
Yet we pursue them
We must find some way
We must find some words
To sound out, caress, and bring to life again
Just for an instant
Three lives,
Three names,
Three people,
Who for the briefest flash of starlight
In their mother’s arms
Joined this great and loving family
They brought much
Much that we can never name
But which blessed this winter air
Snowy and soundless
With that mystery, alive, deep, and flowing
That sings of the eternity of God’s time
Laid out before us in the pulsing light
Of a thousand hosts of galaxies of stars.
For we know that all our lives
Are but a flash in the thoughts of a mountain
And that a mountain rises up
and then melts like wax
All in two bells of a watch in God’s night
And yet nothing can stop the wheel of time itself
Like the song of a mother holding her child
That song, we know,
Belongs to Forever beyond time
A mother’s touch flows down
The river of stars, and then across
To the most distant sunlit shores
And beyond even that.
We know this, it breaks our hearts
And makes us whole,
All in the same heartbeat.
And so we know, and sing in heart’s memory
In an Eternity we might find words
That somehow ring true
To this wrenching, wondering pain
Of children who were here, and are not here,
Of mother’s hopes and father’s hopes unleashed
In three of time’s tiniest arrows
Bearers of their parents’ highest visions
Now vanished in the mist, and out of sight–
The heart cries out to know
What was their course, and where they landed
Yet this world and its ways are so vast
And our own path so wandering, and small
And the fog of pain and loss obscures our search.
And so we call upon our God
Who, man and woman, formed us all
To hold us all as we now hold each other
To hold us as we hold this mother and this father
Gathering our warmth and our love
To see them
Through this night.
God please guide this great and loving family
To see them
Through this night.
