revelations compete

tangled webs

some times are so burdened with poems

I can’t pick out an individual thread to follow,

for immediately I run into other threads

that call to me to follow them:

a jumble of possible paths all mixed together,

I think it’s like a problem we Quakers have

when we open ourselves to revelation

and so much clambers to be heard

that nothing seems to speak clearly,

a person can die and focus us true,

so can a sunrise, a sunset, a tree, a flower, a toddler:

then we might focus into singular clarity,

I come back to my mountains after unprecedented fire

took what the drought-dessicated woods gave it

and ferocious winds fed it,

those same winds wrenching limbs and trees asunder,

great clusters of clutter mock my expectation

of what was and what I thought would still be,

those interwoven piles of branch and trunk

so like the threads I first imagined

at the beginning of this poem.

by Henry H. Walker

December 8, ’16