The Dust God: an Ash Wednesday Poem

a poem I’ve been working on every now and then for the past year or so…never quite satisfied but here it is so far:

 

The Dust God

HKS

His breath lingered over formless depths

not yet settled amidst shapelessness

suspended, poised above void

Darkness.

 

And then a

                 word

carried by breath as water—currents

Breath’s waves producing sound never heard:

“Be!”

 

“Be!” begins

erecting first sights

defining matter’s bounds

Heaven|Earth

 

“Be!” being

carried by breath

disrupting settled dust

lifting it to stand

forming it to hear,

“Be!”

 

Dust, tossed about

Becomes the rise and fall,

the ebb and flow of a swelling chest

Its formlessness takes shape

It’s shape, souled.

 

Dust’s lips form words for its breath to carry

Dust is be-ing

Dust is speaking

 

                             Names

genus and species released

from rib-caged captivity.

 

Dust builds,

Dust sings,

Dust feels

and tastes creation and creating

Dust’s own breath lingers over its creations

Dust’s own words rapture their attention

 

Infatuated by its own mouth’s mist

As it falls on lower beasts,

Dust files the old word among other words

in volumes filled to show Dust’s depth.

 

And in its filing, Dust forgot.

Ignorant of speech

Helpless to breathe

Defunct breath for deflated lungs

Vapid words unfit for a single void

 

And so, the forming form returned to formlessness

Becoming the very earth once pinned down by Dust’s feet

Subsumed, another patch of exploited land,

Dust returned to dust again

 

for without word, all words fall

 

                                                  Amidst the dust

“Be!” became

Dust for Dust

—divine endustment.

True breath breathing gaseous filth

True word projects from dirt-caked lungs

 

Til word was hoisted to the air, and

“Be!” became a nothing hung by a nail

 

Dust God?

No

dust man?

No

    dust alone as all began

 

Brought down from the heights to settle as sand

settles when thrown by the wind.

But the wind would not settle to have him stay down

Swept up by the Father, Dust stood encrowned

 

Dust God was shown to be dust man

“Be!” was shown to be

 

“I Am.”

Resting in the Ashes

“From dust you were created and to dust you will return” were the words of the minister as he spread the ash of last year’s Easter Palm branches into the shape of the cross on the congregants’ foreheads. I was waiting towards the end of the line, having hesitated going up to receive the sign. I was the one who burned the branches and felt that I had already been sufficiently covered in ash prior to the service. My life, for that matter, had been sufficiently covered in ashes. You could say, as of late, life seemed to have been lived in the ashes. Had the minister not said that receiving the sign of the cross symbolized a dependency on God I would not have budged, but he did, so I did.

Typically, Ash Wednesday is viewed as somber. A time to look at our selfish striving and the vanity of our achievements. It’s a time used to reveal all the things that we are attached to: all the things that keep our focus. We give up certain things of pleasure so that our pleasure for worldly things will be directed towards a pleasure in eternal things; that our groans for earthly food will be met with spiritual food. These things are all good things, and they have their place, but they did not have a place for me at the time. When you are dwelling in the ashes all that can be seen is the cross. What can be taken away from a man undone? So as I walked to receive the sign, the painful and cathartic sting that the words “from dust…to dust” evoke for many became, for a moment, a time of rest. I am but dust, and thank God I will one day return. Thank God for the rest that I can take in my own death. For in my death will be the end of bitter hearts, the terms adultery, murder, and pride will be unknown, stress will find no stomach to pain, and racial hatred will be as waste in the mouth of its speaker. My death is the finishing of a race and the beginning of rest until the Son descends and, as one theologian writes, sets creation to its rights.

Living in the Ashes one can only see the cross and thus, one can only rest in the death of the Son, and in resting in the Son’s death, one learns to rest in one’s own death. From dust you were created and to dust you will return to the praise of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.