uncountable words

He wraps himself in light as with a garment;

He stretches out the heaven like a tent

and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.

He makes the clouds His chariot

and rides the wings of the wind.

He makes the winds His messengers,

 flames of fire His servants.

I look up from the book that rests in my hands and I see a picture that not even a thousand words could begin to repaint. David tried, as have many others, as do I. But what construction of my painted babbling can measure up to what only a word of God’s has brought to reality?

 I sit in a blue plastic shred of a chair, my feet scraping the cold cracked concrete of the school floor. Oh God, what a world you have created. From where I sit I can see the cold tendrils of yellow sunlight threading the needle-like trees that bridge the roof of the school to the unfertile garden. It is chilly. The sun glints and glimmers off the dew on the grass, making the ground glitter as if it were covered with snow. A soft breeze floats in from the East, heralding the sun's approach, shaking the earth in her sleep and daring her to rise to meet the day. From where I sit I watch our cold corpse of a compound warm and stretch and yawn the night from her eyes. The shadows shift. The world alights with the flame of rising dawn.

The Day Lucky Went Berserk

                We have three dogs. These dogs have a cage in which they are locked every Sunday morning so they don’t follow us to church and “play” with our neighbors’ livestock which are also brought to church.  We are very thankful for this cage and its sturdiness. It’s probably ten feet high with a roof that was originally noticeably mabati. But now it is camouflaged by ivy-like vines which would make it look very quaint if it wasn’t a metal cage edged by cinder blocks and locked with a chain. Unfortunately, the crows spend much more time in the cage than the dogs do. Or at least, one particularly large pied crow by the name of Lucky.

                Every morning, Cosmas puts dog food in the green basin in the cage. And every day, morning to evening, the singularly ugly crow stands on the edge of the basin, snarfing up what he can with his jagged black beak. A few days ago, Cosmas decided to shut the door of the cage and trap the crow in. He went berserk (the bird, not Cosmas). He flew around in circles, banging against the sides of the cage and squawking like he was being attacked. Feathers flew… and consequently, he did not. He can’t fly anymore, poor Lucky. Though I don’t know why James named him that. He seems to me to be a singularly unlucky bird now that his method of escaping the clutches of gravity has lost a few important feathers. He can’t fly at all. He can hop, though. He hops from stone to stone around and around the fire pit in the back yard. But he can’t hop over the fence surrounding our compound. It’s kind of like he’s our prisoner or something, being punished for the crime of stealing dog food. I can see him now, sitting quietly in the shade of the lemon tree, facing into the wind. He hasn’t realized yet that if he wanted to, he could walk out the front gate and be free. Maybe he just likes us.

                I feel bad for the poor thing. I think he stands facing into the wind in hopes that it will lift him off his feet and he will be able to fly home. Or maybe it just makes him feel like he’s flying, the wind pouring around him like that. He stretches out his shortened wings and stands there for a few minutes. Then, once he realizes he has made no progress, he returns to the shade of the lemon tree to await the terminus of his pet-hood.