Morning. Light hits my eyelids. As I swim up to waking, I mistakenly believe I am alone in the Universe.

I grew up believing that if there was something I wanted to see happen in the world, it was on me to bring it about: me alone. Years of adulthood roll on by before I even grok that this is a burden and a messianic imagining.  More years before I understand this to be an actual impossibility. Going it alone is just not possible.

We are irrevocably linked to one another and held together in God or Reality. Nor can God go it alone. She needs our arms and legs, our hands and voices.

 

Morning has broken

by Sara Eisenberg

 

I wake to find myself

wearing a tattered garment.

During sleep it has become

my skin, no seams,

the barest of hemmed edges

 

gilded with holes,

some gaping

where the garment hangs

on me,

by turns sad, reluctant, fearful as

light strikes

the fabric.

 

Such is the effort of waking as

if burdened by breath and pulse.

 

Once showered, properly

dressed for weather and agenda,

no one but You knows the undergarment.

Even I forget as the day goes on.

It doesn’t exactly chafe like a hair-shirt

but hums low, occasionally growls

and gives off a whiff of – Bear,

 

persists because You are in the holes and tatters

and persists because it makes a difference that I breathe and pulse

and slog and soar and walk tenderly and blindly

in this reluctant body,

and because it makes a difference that I know You are in the tatters and holes.

 

Still, I long to

lie still,

because there is One who longs

to wake into a world frayed yet made

whole.

---

 

Banner photo: Crooked Sky, Cold wax and oil, by Jude Lobe. Hillsborough Gallery of Art, Hillsborough, North Carolina