liezel graham

dew

you will fall over your own feet one more time, rip the knee

of your favourite jeans where they have grown thin, and on

the way down towards the earth you will ask for a sign.

you will not be the first weary body to do this.

God is kept fervently busy with the business of signs.

some years ask for more than faith, and because we are flesh wrapped loosely around fragile bone, God knows that we need mothers to pick us up, despite the way in which we fold our flimsy wisdom into flags.

how we plant them smugly wherever we go, claiming God’s mouth as our own.

God mothers us, and mothers us, and mothers us, despite what we have been told.

and isn’t this what love does?

a heart folds itself away from things that refuse to introduce themselves by name.

you do not have to feel guilty about this.

how you hold yourself up by the skin of your hope.

how you tremble in front of the great unknown.

how you know that one more wrong move will tip you over the edge.

how you fear taking others with you.

the weight of knowing right from wrong.

the desperation for a sign.

but listen, there is nothing new under the sun.

you are not the first desperate body to hold out your hands.

the story goes that a man asked for dew in an unlikely place.

there is always a return to water.

how many times have you asked for moisture?

how many times have you wished away a clear night?

how many times have you held the wet fleece against your breasts, thinking that if you could only dry it with the heat from your own body, and look! it will be so.

it will be everything you have asked God for.

isn’t this faith? did you know that a man once spoke to a valley of dry bones, and they came to life—filled up with breath right where they lay, and microscopic drops of water fell from their mouths. but first, before the miracle, he had to tell himself that it was alright to look like a fool.

i wonder if he feared his own failure.

the business of asking for signs is no place for an ego.

you have done this too, haven’t you?

leaving pieces of yourself everywhere, hoping to be seen.

you stood there waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and you taught yourself new words that look like a taproot.

how you waited for it to breathe—the thing with many names. all of them sewn deeply into your being, weaved into the possibility of your fragile happiness, or into the flank of the grief that you did not want to know by its name.

how you heard it approaching in the distance.

how you turned your head away, so as not to look.

in the end you held it all bone-white in your closed hands.

decided to be brave.

decided to call it alive.

if you held it at just the right angle, it almost appeared to be breathing.

almost.

isn’t this faith? believing the dead to be alive?

a Lazarus, of some sorts.

i have done it too.

i know the notches on almost every bone in the body, the points of insertion, and the fossae that yearn to be full, or at the very least attached to something—perhaps the word love.

maybe, that elusive paradise called chosen.

but not all dead things want to come back to life.

and some might just be sleeping. it happens.

but building a new house on the edge of a valley filled with what-was-once-alive, will cost you more hours than you have left and more life than you should ever give.

and if you were to look away for a small moment, you might see how your walls are filled with softness anyway.

you might notice how the afternoon light likes to sneak in through your kitchen window.

you might begin to see all the ways in which you are able to choose the shape of your own life.

you might find the place in which to plant the last seconds that you are given.

here is another small truth: you are running out of time, even now you are outgrowing your skin, and your life, and all the things that you have always thought were real.

all these things are slowly falling from you because you won’t need them in the next room.

there, in that place, none of this will matter anymore.

you can’t take much with you, except the names of the ones you love and the blue of a robin’s egg.

even then, you might forget all of this.

but i don’t know.

nobody really does, despite what is passed around the table as wisdom and certainty.

i have held the hands of people as they leave this place, but

i haven’t been there myself, so this is the wisest thing that i might say to you about death: that i simply don’t know, but it finds its way into my words so often. death, is also life.

what else can i say that might be a balm to your heart?

not knowing what you want to know, is a heavy load to carry.

knowing what you don’t want to know, is even heavier.

this is why God is kept busy with the business of signs.

some of us simply need to hold the answers in our hands.

this is all the faith that we can muster.

there is no shame in this.

this is for you still searching wildly for an answer.

when you wake up with water on your feet—the water that you asked for, run your fingers slowly over the sign that you have been given.

say thank you.

lift your head and call yourself: i-know-which-way-to-go.

then, bring your hands up to the country of your mouth and taste your new truth.

‘dew‘, a poem from The Velveting Bones, 2022