Iris Lennox

Tag: God

  • Hope

    Without reservoirs, pumps, or measured release—
    water roils beneath the surface,
    through stone, around roots,
    navigating the dark.

    In the slow movement along its path,
    through soil, around what resists it,
    a force gathers
    until the ground gives way.

    And then a spring, then a river—
    arriving as it was set in motion,
    current and lucidity together,
    depth and brightness inseparable.

    On the surface
    light scattering,
    quick movements, flickers—

    what we call joy.

    Below—
    weight and direction,
    a current that does not scatter
    or turn back—

    what we call peace.

    The river carries both at once,
    dividing nothing,
    choosing neither.

    And we, without instruments to measure belief,
    stand at the bank,
    calling that faith—
    to stay.

    When it reaches us,
    not as droplets,
    but as a rising beyond its edges,
    we find ourselves entered
    rather than filled.

    So what can be said of hope
    by those who wait for the river to be visible
    before they believe it is moving?

    In believing,
    in the quiet continuance of it,
    God gives:

    joy at the surface,
    quick, ungraspable,
    arriving in flashes,

    and peace—
    lower in the water,
    where nothing hurries,
    where the current keeps its direction
    without being seen.

    And hope—
    as the river
    when it exceeds its banks,

    moving through fields
    that were never called river,
    carrying its course
    beyond where we stood.

    —Iris Lennox

    Romans 15:13

  • Legacy

    Ask the old ones.
    Not for stories—
    for dates, distances,
    what came first and what followed.

    Has anything like this happened before?

    A people hearing a voice
    from the middle of fire
    and continuing to breathe
    after the sentence ended.

    Fire does one thing well.
    It finishes what it starts.

    Yet there they stood,
    faces lit from below,
    listening to licks and flares
    carry meaning
    without turning kindling to ash.

    Or this—

    a nation taken out of another nation,
    not quietly,
    but with signs that carved faces
    and covered the sun,
    by a hand that did not hide itself,
    with a kind of persistence
    that left artifacts in places
    and on the skeletons that witnessed it.

    Ask Egypt,
    if ruins could answer.

    Ask the sea,
    which briefly agreed
    to try on the accoutrements of land
    and then returned
    to its original fashion.

    They were shown these things
    so they would know—
    this is how the account records it.

    Not suspect.
    Not wonder.

    Know
    that the voice was not one among many,
    not a possibility,
    a debate
    between equally convincing objections.

    Above, below—
    no second version waits
    to be discovered later.

    This is the claim
    as it has been carried forward.

    So they are told to keep it.

    Not out of fear,
    though fear was present.
    Not out of habit,
    though habit will come.

    Keep it
    so that when their children ask
    what happened in those days,
    they will not offer
    a softened account.

    Tell them
    they heard something
    that should have undone them
    and did not.

    Tell them
    they walked through what closed behind them.

    Tell them
    there was no comparison
    then,

    and there isn’t one now.

    —Iris Lennox

    Based on Deuteronomy 4:32-40