Dear Lord, the wren

Dear Lord, the wren

is back with his little song, his little prayer of hand-sized desire, his large wanting summed up in a body too small to contain, his burden. Once I asked the god-People what they meant when they kept saying burden all the time. I have a burden for the water-carriers in Africa, I have a burden for California.

They said it means that you can’t stop praying. They didn’t say it was like the taste of rhubarb or sharp cider or Longing as a Second Language. They didn’t say it would come again and again like rising gutturals, want or apple-ness and be white as the arms of the sycamore. They didn’t say it was  expansive as the Chinese Chest Point, the Sea of Qi. They didn’t say, here it comes again, Love, as Untranslatable Salt.

Jeanie Tomasko