This
I saw:
We were standing, bathed in song
singing
words to praise that sacred scroll,
the Torah scroll (down
through Sinai’s flame,
and down that mountain’s quaking
agony,
and sung through dozens of centuries)
we sang
of
clinging to this tree of life, this scroll,
and someone, honored
to lift it to its place,
its sacred place,
slipped.
The scroll
fell,
struck the floor with the sound of a thing that falls—
a
stone, a block.
The singing stopped.
We stood,
silent,
stunned, and only then—lost,
drowned in shocked silence—only
then,
our song mute—then—only then,
dumb with an
ancient dread, we were able to pray.
Only then—no song, no
chant, no text—
we prayed, not knowing we prayed.
Mute with grief,
mute
with dread—that silence took its power
from Sinai’s howling
cosmic trumpet blast
folded within the barely heard thud
of
the scroll striking the floor.
Our
soul dwells
in a still place deep below our mountain,
silent
below that Sinai of the heart,
not to be roused by comfort,
songs of praise,
or sweetly chanted text.
The sting and shock
of collapse, in a breathless
moment, bursts awake
that cave below the heart where the soul
waits.
Now
this I saw:
A sacred thing tumbled
into
the gray day, and the soundless cry,
transcendent, burst awake
the stupid world,
and then we could pray.
All the rest is
talk.