by Michael Hicks
You, Lord, were never
my shepherd.
I never felt your hand
tousle my wooly head
as I trotted the lawn
beside a lake.
Never heard you blow
your pipes in the pasture
as I vanished into sleep.
Some days you’ve been
a shadow chiseled on my porch.
Other days, only smoke
I couldn’t exhale.
How often have I bumped
my knees on the floor
like spilled apples hitting
pavement? How often
have I fingered through
the good books and found
only bones of your secrets?
It took one wife and two
near misses, four kids walking
onto the planet, brushing
history from their heads,
a tour of Zip codes
and business cards enough
to pack the bowl of our
jigsawed lives
till I found you,
no shepherd,
just my heart dilated
off the charts into some new
experiment of joy.
Without looking it up,
I learned what “behold” means.
Because I beheld and saw:
Microbes are your blood flow.
Crickets your power grid.
Every cornstalk is a fountain,
every peach a bell.
The whole earth is your banjo,
strung with a billion stems.
You milk the universe
and it sprays out stars.
::
Michael Hicks is a Professor Emeritus of Music Composition at Brigham Young University. Among his literary works are nine published books, the latest of which, Wineskin: Freakin’ Jesus in the ’60s and ’70s (Signature Books) was the winner for Best Memoir, Mormon History Association (2023). He is also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Mormon Letters (2023). For more on his work, see http://www.michaelhicks.org.
Image: Vlad Deep
ID: corn stalk in a basket.
Psaltery & Lyre 