Veritas
Words scream out from billboards, from speakers from mouths;
And the concrete used to build walls around right and wrong is rough from indecision and movement, crumbling to pea gravel, indecipherably gray stony rubbish.
Chesterton claimed “A creed is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable,” (Chesterton, G.K. What is Wrong With the World?. Dodd, Mead, & Comp. 1910) but sin is a trigger word used to shame and its definitive bounds have dwindled along with Truth whose banner lowers to a possessive: “truth” which carries the duality of Janus.
A truth beginning and ending its path on the fickle feelings of a world that has lost all ways to argue well, signs pointing to a garden blurred by time that tells a story so soft and loud that no one hears its urgency.
And Eliot asked “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?…for you know only a heap of broken images…” (Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land. 1909-1962). The stony rubbish of right and wrong, where do we stand if we stand at all and is there a path immovable, immobile that leads to growth and unity or can we build and rebuild – we trip as we walk away.
Vos
And the dragons: those, them, us; we laugh our smoky breath and turn scaled eyes – feeling the pulse of power and following a call out of which even trees will not grow.
My truth, your truth, #sorry-not-sorry waving upon the standard flag we bear.
And the once chiming steeples tinkle their applause while their own mirrored message says “we agree to disagree”, “we agree we are divided,” “we are bound by interpretation”
Broken. Beautiful. Broken.
Kyrie Eleison
Grace and Mercy carry Truth bound in Love to these places
while billboards and mouths and speakers crumble and are remade, but there is no room at the inn and they knock and knock and knock again. Cloud cover confusing our guiding stars with the bright pulse of power – and we follow trails left by long scaled tails into the beautiful forests now burnt away.
Liberabit
Agreeing to disagree, we follow our own understanding of which piece of pea gravel still makes up the true path.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Photo by Gumfa Khransumran