be still – a poem

Listen.

Hear the clock ticking
the subtle roar of the air conditioning,
the growl of the dishwasher,
my laptop exhaling and the
faint sound of typing from the back room.

We call this silence,
when human voices cease
and the sounds that lie beneath still whisper
a never-ending cacophony growing louder and louder
the longer our tongues lie still.
Listen!
Every thought is
tied to the tick and the tock as the hands
go round and round and my
mind finds no rest,
whirring on the gears of this
giant machine.

tick. tock.

The motion never stops.
Each second I’m dying,
giving a mite of my life
each moment—
what a waste it seems,
caught up in this urgency,
this tension that pulses through me
and the worries that never seem to stop
while the silence only grows
and grows, but it
doesn’t drown out my thoughts
as they tear me apart and try to
find ways to put me back together again.
I fight to take them captive, but they
slip through my grasp and leave my
knuckles bloody and my lungs gasping,
and finally I think “enough.”
But they don’t stop,
these anxious cares and
relentless ponderings, and the
silence is pounding at my skull as though to say,
“you thought you’d find peace? think again!”
and I do,
again and again and
again.

Listen.
Quiet your soul, little one.
Be still.

In the agony of your thoughts,
in this chaos that you’ve nurtured into a
choked and tangled garden,
quiet your soul and
breathe.

Be still and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!

Yahweh speaks.
At his word the noises hum and settle,
shifting to the cadence of his voice.
Listen to the whir, the exhale,
the roar, the growl,
the tick and the tock.
He set the motion of this sphere,
and this song is his song.

Be still, little one, and forget yourself.
You are not God.
Yahweh is.
And in the frenzy of this world
and the madness of your mind
he bids you to be still and
behold him.

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Inspired by Psalm 46