(Y)OUR COMING TO VOICE IN (Y)OUR NAME

(Y)OUR COMING TO VOICE IN (Y)OUR NAME



For Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy



You have come to voice in our name

Even as you have sought yours, seeking

Salving sentences and taming thoughts

Where language is absent and our grief,

Present as present can be in our search

For the fullness we shall be, takes flight

And flee to the permanent places of our pains.

In the seeking for meaning is all what we have.

It is solitude, this. It is aloneness of the self

We construct for others, believing in the faith

We have to come to grace to accept the truth

Of our bodies, their topography the distances

In the journeys we need to traverse in between

Commitment for difference, with our loss palpable

This sense of what we can do to make sense

With our wounded words, human and going divine

In the manner we can make a vow to live for,

To die for, everyday in one thousand lifetimes

And one thousand death-times in this ceaseless

Cycle of hoping what is yet to come, cool, collected

And clear, as the logic of alien loves beyond premises

Because peaking in all the warmth of smiles we have

From the cold trajectories of our dreams, young

And younger, always aiming holier and higher than

What the heavens can tell, these dreams of color

And the fullness of voice, fear hidden somewhere

Away from the syllables of music that make us one,

The courage in the verses you tell for us to bring

Home, sanctified lines, paragraphs, chapters

Of stories we write, in clear scripts and vision

To redeem ourselves from this sad longing

We cannot know, we will never know, but here

In this presence we have for each other, here

Is where our petitions will go: our prayers for you

Even as we ask you to raise your hand for us

In the name of the Spirit that will forever keep us.



Nakem Youth

Honolulu, Hawaii, March 27, 2010