Jesus Wept

It is reported how Jesus to the centurion’s palsy struck daughter cried: “Little maiden, Arise!”
And learning of Lazarus’s demise---wept.

Tears of purity,
Tears of forgetting,
Rivulets of tears
Waters of hope,
Waters of joy.

Thunder pounds his mighty drum
High upon a meadow
I am swept into a pow-wow circle
Four doors
The sweat lodge’s searing,
Orange and black tigers of fire lashing straps upon my back.
The tattered wing of black night 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.

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.

Puddles of mercury rain dazzle and dance
Lake Randall rocks gentle and slow
Like a shimmering jewel
This greedy, fractured nation cannot know why Jesus weeps.
Thunder roars, in the mighty forests oaks cease to grow, valleys shake their fiery fingers to the heavens.
Silver clouds roll on forever into the smokey deeps
Wounded streams have lost their way.

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.
For the 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 dry of dry .
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,
Who render the low high and the high low.
Like Judas’ tarnished silver
And broken kiss
Howling sirens race the streets where
Brown eyed children with laughing eyes dance
Where cripples beg to learn the reasons for Jesus’ weeping.