Jesus Wept

It is reported how Jesus to the centurion’s palsy struck daughter cried: “Little maiden, Arise!”
And learning of Lazarus’ swift demise---wept.
Tears of purity, Tears of forgetting,
Rivulets of tears
Waters of hope,
Waters of joy.

Today Jesus weeps tears like soft rain drifting on the Howling Andes Hills
On big skies of the endless Dakota plain rolling on forever,
Amidst the Color dipped butterflies, and sweet smelling bundles of alfalfa.
On the scorched land drier than dry healing rains begin to fall
But the earth cannot say why.

High upon a meadow
Thunder pounds his mighty drum
Four doors, a burial mound, pow-wow
sweat lodge’s searing,
Orange and red tigers of fire lashing straps upon my back.
Black night's tattered wing swoops low
The devil’s diamond claw screeches
Scraping up to the hills the stony burrow
Blood fills the furrow
Red and fiery pink beyond my window.
Puddles of mercury rain dazzle and dance
Lake Randall rocks gentle and slow like a shimmering jewel
Thunder roars, valleys shake their fiery fingers to heaven,
Mighty forests no longer give oaken sanctuary.
Silver clouds roll on forever into the smokey deeps
Wounded streams have lost their way.
This greedy, fractured nation cannot imagine why Jesus weeps.

Arise, arise!You Silver tarnished skies above the Andes hills
Roll over the endless Dakota plain.
Shower the morning rooftops of this world glistening the weeds and grass.
Tears like soft rain hissing.
Scorched Indian earth
Cradles roots snug deep into the dry of dry:
So many tears Jesus is weeping!
Lake Randall is a shimmering jewel in Dakota’s ochre crown:
hungry roots reach deeper into the mineral strata.
But even the drowning earth does not know why Jesus weeps.

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

I wander alone on the streets of men, the proud and mighty,
Statesmen who render the low high and the high low.
Pharasaic tarnished silver
And Judas' broken kiss.
Howling sirens race the streets where
Brown eyed children with laughing eyes dance
News breaks the chatter
Where cripples beg to learn the reasons for Jesus’ weeping.