Holy Rhythm

Bluish, jagged sky

          melts and moves over

Allemande earth—

          never once the same.

Clouds morphing, monument

to the adagio breeze

that comes and goes and

flows to parts unknown.

 How strange to sit and hear

no machine, or ding, or ringtone or alarm.

no calls for more and better work,

of solving one more problem,

of making peace between two hearts,

of doing more, not being.

…WAIT.

Is that my soul I hear?

          Is that what it sounds like,

what it feels like?

Could it be that this is what it all means?

*

 Ah yes, the Rhythm of it all!

*

I feel the pounding of that heaven or that hell,

depending on my meter,

for how it’s heard defines me, more than it.

It rings with accents hard

and downed beats

dubbed and crushed and

spilling out beyond my churlish measures

into time and time again, or is it stop-time?

 I don’t know for sure.

          I only know this bloody Rhythm is around me,

inside me, washing through me.

I suppose what I’ve discovered here is the ,

Deep crying out to my deep

fully without words

yet full of logos-meaning, certainly.

 I’m lost in it, this pulse that flies me

onward and upward

to another plane, another realm.

  I’m found by it, no longer hearing;

silently sensing that reverberation

of the beats of creation being made

from nowhere to somewhere.

All this in a swift imagination

of percussive faith grown piercing in its treble

and tacit in its middle ranges,

all the while searching for the grounding bass

that brings the soul to rest amid the drive of life.

 One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

 Alive within the rests I glimpse again,

with purer sense—that Holy Rhythm is my own.

 Thomas Argersinger

August 2022

Cherokee National Forest, TN