You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Psalm 51:6)
Last Monday, a friend and I shared a Lenten Eucharist together. The Scripture passage we read was from Psalm 51. My friend was especially interested in verse 6. What did the psalmist have in mind in those cryptic words “wisdom in my secret heart”? For some reason not fully known to me at the time, I suddenly remembered the little downy who had been frightened by a hawk the night before and had clung to our suet—so still, for what seemed like forever. I told my friend of that downy’s stillness and said I thought it was somehow connected to this verse. Her response? “Carol, I have a challenge for you. There is a poem here. Write it!” Well, here it is. I hope it captures something of what the psalmist had in mind when he spoke of “wisdom in my secret heart.”
***
Utter stillness.
Fifteen minutes.
Not a twitch of her tiny beak,
not a flicker of her feathered dress.
*
Sensing danger in the rush of hawk
wings stitching fear across the sky,
my little downy clasps the iron rungs
that hold her suet and her life;
she sits, an utter stillness
tucked beneath her folded wings,
beneath the hyssop-clean
white feathers of her breast.
*
She is only a fifth the size
of the hungry, circling hawk,
but settled in the veins and bones
that bind her tiny downy self,
there dwells the weight of who she is.
*
The weight of who she is,
innate awareness we’ve somehow lost
in all the shuffles of our days;
but she is fully present in this moment;
in this Now; vulnerable before powers
that soar and dip and threaten
to destroy, but nonetheless,
her speck of life as brilliant
as the evening star, belovéd
as the shining of the dawn,
held in hands that spin
the stars and daily weave
the radiance of each new day.
The weight of who she is—
she is so dangerously exposed;
yet she is vibrant and eternally secure.
*
Teach me this wisdom in my secret heart.
from the slow lane 