Lord Have Mercy – The Commingling of Grief and Joy
Full, bloated with beauty. A half a century plus eight years of looking up, I wonder again how the crevices, shadows, and craters, and chunks— wholly, holy cheese (a poet’s words not an astronomer’s terms)— are visible from Earth. I wondered how it seemed to have swallowed up all the light. Every glint and glimmer of the sun’s beams, transformed them into moon beams. In that blink.
The one between the set and rise, the pas deux of earth and sky.
Physicists and psalmists and poets and God knows on this one thing we can surely agree. We’ve never stop looking up at the blinding moon, man or no man.
Achingly we hold on to all it sends our way.
Night on night, the singleness of its trajectory appears to be aimed right at my broken heart.
This journey through my window pane, via crossbars in the crosshairs on a violent night here on Mother Earth. Full bloated with pain.
The explanation was Google-able. But I needed only magic and mystery. No explanation would console me, no explanation for the orb’s blinding grace would soothe me into understanding.
Radiant beauty that blinded me the night the evil rained down in Vegas was bound for Earth, a long forever, ago. And will be forever more.
Two unexplainable facts. Beauty, moving me to tears. One eye cried tears from the beautiful. One eye cried from the pain.
Lord have mercy on the ones. Whose soul windows are bloated with commingled saline tears. Blessed are the ones whose cheeks were tear stained.
The night the bullets rained down in Vegas, Lord have mercy on that night.
That night the moon refused to refuse to shine.
My eyes, my spirit, that night, as blue as a pair of full blue moons. Every once in awhile the tears run rapid down the cheeks, a race to the finish line.
The point where grief heals all wounds, mends all things, bears all things. Love.
And still.
The world is bloated.
With beauty.
elizabeth w. marshall 