Dusted

Along with so many others, I’ve recently been encouraged by John Mark Comer’s book, Practicing the Way. In it he quotes an ancient Jewish blessing that has impressed itself in my soul.

This poem begins the chapter “Until Following” in my first poetry collection, All the Untils, recently published by Resource Publications of Wipf and Stock.

To purchase, click here: All the Untils

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Dusted
May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi . . . 
first century Jewish blessing

so sifted in the soot of his sandals
that you’re close enough to talc your trailing 
feet in the whirling specks of each step’s tread,
wrapping your tarry in a russet mist, 
the powdery cloud in which you stumble 
blind, learning to abide the murkiness 
of his spurned shadow on an untraveled 
byway, a prepared high-way . . . when it is dust  

that forms you, and you are free to follow,
to catch the fallen crumbs, to breathe the rot 
of lepers, to rub the muddied sorrow,  
to live as his—to carry your own cross 
in wake of his rivened flesh, so throwing
aside your sandals and kicking up dust.