Jesus Wept

It is reported how Jesus before calling to Lazarus: “Arise,”
wept.
And the time when to the centurion’s daughter struck with palsy he cried: “Little maiden, ARISE!”

Skies like tarnished silver butterflies
Weep tears like soft rain
On the Rolling Andes Hills.
To eyes which survey
The endless Dakota plain

Tears of purity
Tears of forgetting;
Rivers of tears.
Tears of hope
Tears of joy.
Tears of family and earth
Tears of friends
So many tears
Jesus wept.



Thunder poured upon the rooftop
I saw the tattered wing of night swoop low
Heard the devil’s diamond claw
Scraping in the stony burrow
Blood filled the furrow
up to the sky
Red and fiery and pink.

On the porch deck
Silver puddles of rain
Dazzle and dance.
Lake Randall rocks leaden and slow
Like a shimmering jewel

The rain shower glistens
The weeds and grasses.

High upon a meadow
I stepped into a pow-wow circle
And was Initiated within the sweat lodge.
On the scorched Indian land
drier than dry
healing rains began to fall,
but the earth doesn’t know why Jesus wept.

This poem is a trail of broken treaties
It is a fence---
A net in the salty sea of Galilee.

I wandered lonely on the streets of man
Where the proud and mighty
Made the low high
And the high low
Like tarnished silver
And broken promise
Howling sirens race into the night
On the streets where
Brown-eyed children with laughing
Eyes dance.
The beggar calls out for love,
And finds no reply
He cannot remember how Jesus wept.

When Jesus wept
Tears like soft rain
Drifted on the Rolling Andes Hills
On big skies where silver clouds
Roll on forever
Silver skies like tarnished butterflies
And clouds like the rolled bundles of sweet smelling alfalfa.


Postscript:
This morning rain showered the rooftop of this world/made glisten the weeds and grasses mada Lake Randall a shimmering jewel. Inn the scorched Indian earth hungry roots reach even deeper into the dry of dry… the earth doesn’t know why… Jesus wept.
And in the mighty forests the tallest oaks were fallen. Thunder roars/the valley shakes/ fires leap up into the sky. Silver clouds roll on forever, but the streams have lost their way.