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Thank Goodness
Andrea Gibson
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Thank Goodness
A love poem for Buddy Wakefield
At the end of your ten day meditation retreat
You got in your car drove thirty peaceful feet and ran over a bird.
Splayed its holy guts on the pavement like God
Finger-painting "Fuck you" across that deep breath
You were holding the way your mother held her first born.
You, thank goodness were torn from the Bible the day before they burned it for the verse about dancing to tambourines.
Once you saw the blood of Christ on a knife carving redwood trees into church pews.
Now every Sunday morning you hear glaciers melting and you cry easy
As a one night stand never ever is
When you see the feathers in your rear-view mirror scattering like prayers
Searching for a safe place to land.
Hold me to my word when I tell you I will leave today,
Catch a bus ticket west just to stand in the center of your highway
Blocking traffic 'til every feather's answered.
I've see too many prayers caught in the grills of 18 wheelers and folks like us
Have shoulder blades that rust in the rain,
But they're still g sharp whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption.
So go ahead world pick us
To make things better.
We've been building a bridge through the center of this song since Mother Theresa replaced the walls of her church with the weeping cries of Calcutta's orphaned ghettos.
You wanna know what the right wing never got?
We never questioned the existence of God.
What we questioned is his bulldozer turning Palestine into a gas chamber.
What we questioned is the manger in Macy's
And the sweatshops our children call the North Pole.
What we question are the sixty swollen lashes on the back of a girl found guilty
Of the crime of allowing herself to be brutally raped.
What we question is the idea of a heaven having gates.
Silly.
Have you never stood on the end of pier watching the moon live up to her name?
Have you never looked in the eyes of a thief and seen his children's hungry bellies?
Some days my heart beats so fast
My ribcage sounds like a fucking railroad track
And my breath is a train I just can't catch.
So when my friends go filling their lungs with yes.
When they're peeling off their armor and falling like snowflakes on your holy tongue.
God collects the feathers.
We are thick skin covering nothing, but wish bones.
Break in.
You'll find notebooks full of jaw lines we wrote to religion's clenched fist.
Yeah, We bruise easy.
But the sound of our bouncing back is a grand canyon full of choir claps.
And our five pointed stars have always been open to the answer
Whatever it is.
I know David argued with the chisle.
I know he said make me softer
When those tourists come looking for a hero
I want the rain to puddle in my pores.
Build me holy like that.
Build me a kite flown out a bedroom window at midnight
The day freedom set its curfew to 9: 11.
My heaven is a snow globe.
The blizzard will always be worth the touch of your hand,
Shaking me awake like a boy taking deep breaths
All the way down to the dents in his shins
Like he's building a telephone from a string and two tin cans.
He knows God's number by heart.
He knows it isn't listed in any book.
Look me in the bull's eye,
In the laws I broke and the promises I didn't
In the batteries I found when the lights went out
And the prayers I found when the brakes did too.
I got this moment and no idea when it will end.
But every second of this life is scripture
And to know that
Trust me, we don't need to be born
Again.
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