A Word in a Stroke of Luck

A Word in a Stroke of Luck

By Jane Tawel

December 7, 2024

*

I shall call You, “Good”.

You are My Good.

You mean ALL for The Good.

I shall call upon You in the night,

“Oh, My Good!”

“Help us, Dear Good”.

I will meditate

on the World’s Beauty of Good.

I will stand in awe

in the World’s Mystery of Good.

I will put my trust in the power of Good.

For You, are a Good, Good, Good-ness.

I will love You, Oh, my Good;

and have faith that Good-ness

will not only follow me and mine

All the days of this lifetime,

but that I shall dwell in the House of Good

Forever and ever.

Amen.

*

Words are funny, shallow, flitting things.

Poor words, they try so hard.

And though they fail again and again,

we pick them back up, dust them off, and try once more

to use them to explain,

to use words to understand,

to take words and try to

put an outer shell to what is inside of us –

What is Inside of All.

*

Poor Words! How exhausted they must be!

They beg us to give them a rest.

But instead, we invent algorithms

to create more and more words

again and again and again

done by computers so words

have less meaning than even the

words of a worm might have.

*

We think in constant gales of words

Ghosts of words of past and future

Words with no meaning at all.

So, we never have to be still.

And the Silence will never touch us

surrounded by,

hunkered down,

lost and alone

in our fortresses of words.

*

Oh, Poor Words!

Words swim upstream — 

light, floating inconsequentially

in the Ocean of True Truth,

in the Ocean of Unspoken Meaning beyond Meaning.

And there they go again!

Lost. Irretrievable. Unspoken. Too late. Too soon.

We only shut up when we’re dead.

*

What a Stroke of Luck for me!

For this morning,

as I grumbled over Past and Future,

A mind consumed in a mire of useless wording,

I happened to be writing something on a page,

And carelessly my mind glitched

on spelling, “God”.

And accidentally adding another “o” — 

A Stroke of Luck in One Small Stroke!

And Oh, my Soul!

Oh, Joy!

I happened to have slipped upon

a banana peel of misspelling

and landed in a Heaven of New Insight!

With my one small stroke of pen,

with one tiny letter,

with one mistake (I thought) — 

I have thrown out a buoy into the

Raging Tides of Time and Space.

And now I think I may make it

to The Shore.

*

Yes, you may laugh

Or shake your head at me

Or frown at my naivety or lack of theory,

And you may still cling to what you need to believe

about a God you want to call your own,

whose name has been taken in vain so many times

that it has lost all meaning.

But for me –

that one change, that “O”,

has quite suddenly!

made all the difference to me.

*

Oh, My Good!

I praise You for the Word,

for one small word to

change my angers and my fears into

a fledgling, hoping love of You.

Thank you for all my broken words,

that like a child with chalk in hand

search for You with fleeting strokes

on the sidewalks of this Life.

Thank you for one small circle

to begin to shape

the circle of this Life

of one small soul,

for All.

Today may I Be.

Still.

And Know.

That You.

Are.

GOOD.

*

© Jane Tawel, 2024