Purity
Sole draft on 11/18/2013; minor undated edits which appear to have been at a different time.
What we thought was worthless and deserved,
Therefore, contempt and ignorance,
Now reappears in Glory at our shattering.
Our hands—too weak to reconstruct
From scattered fragments what was held before
To be our beauty, value, and redemption—
Shake in trepidation at the urge
To hold, caress, rely on what had made us weak
(So we had thought in hubris) but now shows
Its deep-true nature as the root and mainspring
Of our loves and lives and losses;
Of our dreams and tribulations;
Of, in short, our naked-worried selves.
This marrow of our being cries for shelter
From a world too well whetted at its edges;
From these hearts, heat-hardened and unbroken,
Testing their resilience at each chance
Encounter—innocent, sometimes, of ill-intent,
But brutal in their forceful-eager strength,
Purblind to the bitter price of truth
The objects of their testing often pay
But rarely understand or countenance.
Oh, we are broken, though it takes
A razing of our each defenses to make clear
To our too-terrified too-comfortable selves
Just how profound the true degree
Of this hard saying runs and yawns and aches
For final freedom and a filling flame.