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POETRY

Faith

A mustard seed of faith in fragile green
shoots through this hard-packed rationality

and all my mountains tremble in their places
all my oceans turn their stormy faces
to the open sky and see the Son of Man,
a ghost upon the heavens.

One small drop of infinite glows
Inside this finite shell—

and all the depth and wideness of the universe
its limitless expanse, barren stretch of wilderness
with broken planets and debris—
they live and move and breathe inside of me.

(A woman pregnant with the world is strange
and stranger still the mustard seed of faith
she shelters in her womb.)

Virgin Mary mother of my yes—
vessel bearing microscopic endlessness—
you teach me to believe in what exceeds my reach

the question as it tumbles down from God
(the brightly new the everlasting old
and resonant inside my fumbling mind).

My spirit has a palm, my soul an eye
and each are troubled by an empty ache
for I was made for everything I say—

for everything

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Faith II

“…for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.” —James 1:6

driven and tossed
by waves my lungs
my fingers stretch
tenuously

for the unknown.
(my reach is weak
my gasp even
more so watch me

slide and move watch
me forget my
composure and
begin to drown.

ten-thousand times
a novice in
water-walking
an animal

once abused who
shrinks beneath your
open hand who
lives in opaque

prisons of thought.)
my storms my pains
are nonetheless
two-dimensional

and they recede
beneath the bigness
of air.

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J.F. Rains is a musician and mother of four who lives near Chattanooga, TN.

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Photo Credit: “fern sprout” by Kazue Asano, Flickr.com.