CRYING OUT

Monday, April 18, 2011

PSALM 55:4-5

My heart is in anguish within me;
the terrors of death assail me
Fear and trembling have beset me;
horror has overwhelmed me.

NUMBERS - 3

An intersection, at once cadence and overture,
Hinge and turning point, the moment when
The pasts we shape begin to shape our future.

Etty Hillesum recalled how her father had said
‘Jews in a desert? We’ve seen the landscape before.’
Babylon, the Temple’s fall, six million dead.

Give ear to my cry, don’t hold your peace at my tears.
Is this the moment where testimony and story meet?
A passing guest, an alien like all my forebears.

Teach us, cries the psalmist, to number our days.
The exile, the scattering, now the ovens and marches.
Isaiah’s world still stumbling onwards in praise.

Have I not told you from old you’re my witnesses?
The desert through which we pass will bloom again.
I did not speak in secret in a land of darkness.

The Gosamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust by Mhceal O’Siadhail.


PRAYER

We confess that what we had created to meet our greed and selfishness has now resulted in this human-made disaster after the natural disasters. Jesus, you know the agony of Fukushima people in this unimaginable fear of radiation and unknown future with the nuclear disaster. Lord, hear our cries.