Flint Psalm at the Ruined Gate

Amid civic ruin I am forced to name goodness
without lying for it.

You will not let me praise from a distance,
Christ,
while sirens stitch the dusk
and the courthouse wears plywood like a blindfold
and under the overpass a man sleeps
with his shoes in his arms
as if even sleep must keep watch.

You put two stones in my mouth—
praise and protest—
and say, Strike.

So hear me:
I will not call smoke incense.
I will not bless the boot for being swift.
I will not name the decree mercy
while mothers count the missing.
I will not lay a white cloth over the mouth of suffering
and call the gag a hymn.

Yet You press harder.
Not goodness as cover.
Not goodness as answer-sheet.
Goodness with glass in its palm.
Goodness kneeling in the blood-warm stairwell.
Goodness giving its last clean water away.
Goodness refusing the throne of cruelty
even when cruelty has all the loudspeakers.

Then You breathe.

Not on the safe part of me.
Into the split in the throat.
Into the jaw where praise and protest grind.
My ribs become bellows.
My tongue, struck flint.
A spark climbs the wet rope of the spine.

I say I, and the word begins to loosen.
The avenue runs through my lungs.
Ambulances ring in my teeth.
Brick-dust enters prayer.
Your side opens over the city,
or the city breaks open inside Your side—
I cannot keep the edges.
I only know the wound has taken in the streetlight,
the broken bottle,
the child crying under somebody else’s coat,
and nothing is lost there by being seen.

I try to accuse You
and the accusation bursts into petition.
I try to praise You
and the praise comes up gravelled, true.

Blessed are You—not for the fist,
not for the cell,
not for the clean-shaven lie calling itself order—
Blessed are You in the woman binding a stranger’s head
with the hem she tears from herself.
Blessed are You in the boy who carries bread
through a corridor of curses.
Blessed are You in the hand that shakes
and still lifts the beam.
Blessed are You in every small unbroken yes
the world has not managed to kill.

Now the voice sparks.
Not mine.
Yours, finding tinder in the wreck.
The mouth that wanted verdict becomes ember.
It names goodness the way a bell names morning:
by being struck.

So I kneel in the runoff of a burst hydrant,
black water, red light, a shattered moon,
and say good there.

It hurts.
It burns clear.

Before the mouth can claim the word,
my hands are already under the fallen beam.

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