Metal Lock Box Found in the Fire Debris
Open slowly. Here find nothing of the why. You know the how.
I leave behind these several whats: my way of saying sorry.
Find inside my love for you, now betrayed and yet unscathed.
Find old peels of belly laughter, curled by heat, and faint,
but hold them close up to your ear and you will hear, and laugh in turn.
Forgive the fingernail clippings, flayed from constant clawing.
My favorite pen that scribbled poems that for a moment dazed the demons,
pockets of fresh air I gulped, pinprick shafts of light.
Ten stones snatched from river beds that always sparkled so much brighter
where they first lay rather than when later in my hand.
My sleep shirt (funny name because in fact I hardly slept at all)
hopefully has kept intact some wisps of my cologne,
and if it’s mingled up with smoke, the metaphor is yet more apt.
The autumn maple leaf long-pressed in my Old Man and the Sea.
My weathered pair of hiking boots. How from valley fog they led me
up to views the kind Van Gogh would surely have stopped to paint.
And do you really think he shot himself out in the field of wheat?
I am now suspecting foul play at Auvers-sur-Oise.
You will not find my wedding ring as I have carried it here with me,
a talisman with which to seek your mercy and to send
you word I have arrived where nothing ever need be carried up,
and despite my lack of papers, let you know they let me in.
I was sobered to read recently about the tragic suicide of a young pastor in Southern California. Jarrid Wilson took his life early last September the night after presiding over the funeral of a young woman who had taken her life. Jarrid was open and vulnerable about his own struggles with depression and had even founded a mental health advocacy group called Anchors of Hope. A year earlier, in August of 2018, another young Southern California mega-church pastor, Andrew Stoecklein, took his life. He had just returned from a 4 month sabbatical dealing with panic attacks and severe depression. His first sermon series back in the pulpit was entitled “Hot Mess” which aimed to address issues of mental illness. 12 days later he killed himself. I write this poem in tribute to these two precious servants of Jesus who were unable to escape the undertow of depression, and to add my voice to the many voices working to shed light on the depression epidemic that is everywhere around in hope that such light will lead many to seek and find help and healing.