“I revealed myself to those who didn’t ask for me”
Isaiah 65:1
“I Posed in a Bikini in Times Square.” Anna O’Brien. Cosmopolitan. July 3, 2018.
I can do this forever, but for you,
it’s now or never.
You whisper, grin, push me away, question
whether I was ever there, tell yourself
you don’t have to answer
even if I am.
Sometimes, you provoke me to my face.
Usually, though, you busy yourself
with your own imagination,
eating food that makes you hungry,
drinking in what makes you thirst,
worrying about money
or what to do with your body
or wishing you could just stand still,
like a pool of water.
What do I have to do
to distract you from distraction?
Pose in a bikini in the middle of Times Square?
Create a new earth and heaven?
Been there, done that.
You’re no one’s plaything, not even mine.
I didn’t create you
to suck on my toes. You
are a vigil I keep, a flock I pasture,
a grape on the vine
still bursting with blessing
even at the end of harvest,
and I am the light
you’re afraid of losing,
the light in which you can see yourself
as a new reality
you and I are forming.
I know – it’s the scariest thing
that’s ever happened,
the realization
that I am here, as you are here,
you are here, as I am here,
to sing a new song together
about what it means to be human:
not an indecipherable mess, or a pot
of meat and feeling,
or a headstone covered with body paint,
or burning garden, or irony sweating,
or a creature
starving for love. Love
I am revealing.
Poem from the series ShekhinahThe feminine name of God, expounded upon in the rabbinic era and then by the Kabbalists in extensive literature on the feminine attributes of the divine. Speaks
