For My Sake
For My Sake
Kathryn H. Ross
I’ve been white knuckling my faith.
The truth escapes me again and again and
I must be retaught—my being a blank
slate wiped clean by the damp warmth
of a rag held under a spigot then
wrung just dry enough to not drip.
I don’t know if God speaks to me anymore,
or if the words I think I hear come from my own mind;
phantom comforts for my yearning.
I don’t know if God speaks to us anymore,
or if the silence is only because
he said it all when it was finished.
He could talk about how
we abuse him in our search
for meaning; how we abuse ourselves
when meaning refuses to be found.
About how the great king said
all is vanity, vanity…
but I don’t want vanity. I only
want you.
So, I lie in bed listening;
nagged by worry that I have only ever
chased after an indifferent wind. Stubborn,
I try to stop my mind from wandering, from
wondering. If I can just
focus, I’ll hear.
But the room is silent and my heart
is full of whispers I cannot discern.
People die for no good reason.
Choose your favorite metaphor:
candles snuffed by a cold wind. Strings
cut by the scissors of fate. A clock that
winds down until its hands are frozen
at the time of death. However
you say it, how do you say it?
They are gone and everything they were is
now not.
Blessed are the crushed poor-hearted who are
broken in spirit, for you promise to be
as close as you were in the secret place
before we began. Lord, will you
begin again?
I feel there’s no time left for
me to start, for me to live a life—
as if all the living I’ve done
til now was vanity,
as if the fact that there’s no knowing
when I end or how, only that I
will, is enough to stop hoping
for a future.
You ask only this of me:
to love you
to love others
to love myself;
but what if I
can’t love anything?
Would that break your heart?
Must it break your heart?
Will you ever speak again?
I’ve been white knuckling my faith
for so long that my hands are tired;
fingers twitch as my grip loosens
in despair. And it is then—
just then—that you finally speak
and I finally hear:
beloved, you say,
those who cling to their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for my sake
will find it.
So. I open my hands;
free fall into blessed nothing—
For my sake let me lose it; for your sake
let me lose it a thousand times.
Kathryn H. Ross
Writer & Poet
Kathryn is a SoCal-based writer. She is the author of Black Was Not A Label (PRONTO, 2019; Red Hen Press 2022), a collection of essays and poetry, and Count It All Loss (GoldScriptCo, 2021), a poetry chapbook. Learn more about her and read her other works at speakthewritelanguage.com.
Photography by Kassia Melo