John Vigren

he inclined to me

I step wide, pegging the ground now.

Each hour and day is exactly the same

as that before it, filling in the frame

with vague sunshine, like pictures of Dachau

in black and white. Food repels me; I taste

metal. Life consists chiefly of things

thrown tangling underfoot. No imagining

is worthy: what I thought has been replaced

by powers past recall. Lord, do you

dream this much more ashen than I dream?

And can it be that I have really been

loving You wrong? This pit-sick dread is new

and yet so old. Adversity turns shame:

I should have been (not done) thus-and-so;

my fatal missteps made me long ago.

Not, for once, in crisis laying blame

but being blamed, I ask how can Your gifts

display in one unbrained by fear? I call

my wife vile names, muttering, appalled.

If I can’t bless, no usefulness is left.

Wild, I ask what triumph all this serves,

what enemy You mean to wreck by my

erasure. So. I see. Not you and I

only, but one roaming upon the earth,

and all-reproaching, packs the dirt with me:

This cinder-smell, this stumbling among scraps

is not of You at all. But You perhaps

will stretch me on a dusty teaching tree.

In old-friend tunes You tell (not to him who

should have been but me, my actual self,

so often told before, Be someone else)

to listen: Love what I love. I love you.

he stands outside of time

The Lord goes back with me and heals my soul:

I struggled long against my dismal past,

but He is there; He stands astride the whole.

The house where I grew up, dark shame-fast fold,

lies open to my sight, harmless at last;

the Lord goes back with me and heals my soul.

The low lamp-yellow ceilings all foretold

attack approaching, driving forces massed;

but He is there, He stands astride the whole.

Desperate to seem free, we stood in the cold,

as happier people waved to us, and passed;

the Lord goes back with me and heals my soul.

My clasp of lovers, fearful hanging hold—

I feel it now, in poisoned turn and cast;

but He is there, He stands astride the whole.

Now, then, He drains my swollen aches of old:

inside these scenes He holds me, leads me past.

The Lord goes back with me and heals my soul,

for He is there; He stands astride the whole.

John Vigren is a photographer and recovering addict.  His poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Stillwater Review, and Poems for Ephesians, and have won the (Canadian) Christian Publishers Poetry Prize and Utmost Christian Rhyming Poetry Prize.  He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Elizabeth.