Ruth.
This poem was born from my fascination with the ancient story of Ruth and Naomi.
For anyone who has known what it’s like to leave an old life behind, who has walked through grief, who has carried broken dreams, or pursued new dreams that are misunderstood by others… I think we’ve all journeyed out of Moab at some point. Her Name Is:
Ruth.
The road is long and she has ceased speaking,
This woman who carries my future in her hands,
She’s lost to memories, and I too grow silent
In her homeland of ancient trees and primal winds,
Strands of yesterdays trail from my heels,
I hear them, wheezing and spent, their foreign colors
Listless in the glow of this ritual-haunted place,
A land with a history too heavy for words.
The passion of my bold declaration
On the road out of Moab still rings in my ears,
Words bursting out of me, long desperate for air,
Stand irrevocable now in the air between us,
Bold while birthplace rooftops were yet in sight,
Boldness walking now in hesitant feet, mute beast
Slinking into this alien land beside me, a
Land cloaking depths my foreign eyes cannot see.
I remember a grave in my birth-land, the man
Once her son that I married and buried,
His face languishing, touch fading in memory,
These memories limp now in forgetting heartbeats,
Maternal grief still waits for my answer, a
Daughter’s debt unyielding, smoldering reminders
That pain-kissed years don’t quickly surrender their hold;
I am learning that tear-watered ground clings hardest.
The hesitant joy of a long-held dream
Rising glorious on the white sails of morning,
Settling on the creaking oars of noonday stupor,
Slumps listless now in the stifling hull of midnight.
Are you waiting for me here, O strange hope,
Or vanishing, laughing, in fickle illusion?
Migrant heart, stranger aching for home, is it here?
My footsteps fall too loudly on this priestly ground.
They draw nearer, these strange hills I once saw
In the skies of Moab, only dream shadows then,
Now in front of me, soaring into skies too large,
Too full of shofar-cry and incense and God-time;
I know this land holds my grave if not hope,
But whatever it brings, to this land I must go
With her, for as surely as sunrise follows night,
It was this I was born for; it was always her;
It was always this.
