by Claire Adderholt
FRIEZE-FRAME FOR PILGRIMAGE
The fretwork of the human race is desire.
O limited nature, hemmed in at every turn,
feckless with no rescue:
I grieve over thee like a moat at sea.
Forgive us our elaborate frenzies, O Lord,
the intricacies
of our discontents,
our cold notions,
our displacements of worship.
Fold snow over us in frieze-frame of mercy;
let bells ring dimly, far over distant hills,
through skies sleeted to slate with blue.
Let us find anew a way, tremulous
and fair, between anger and grief and disbelief,
to walk between beech and aspen and ember,
between ash-covered trunks that rise slender
and dispossessed in morning mist.
God of all overlooking ways, and of The Way,
guided by sheen of sorrow we stumble
knock-kneed toward a distant destination with no sign.
Deliver us from evil, O Lord, from discontent
constant as a mother, from sin that broods and
brims and has its way. Alpine, the distance that
ices the Lord and our hearts.
O Spirit—
come, float aloft over the roar
of endless waters,
twinkle in the hoarded hold of heavens,
let us be not so long alone.
Gather us together in a warming snare of mercy;
launch us, gripped by grace,
on white-winged pilgrimage toward heaven’s
stretching, remorseless hands.
CLAIRE ADDERHOLT
Claire Adderholt is a poet, missionary kid, and marketing manager who grew up in New Guinea, before moving to Colorado and now lives in Alabama. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Windhover, Cimarron Review, Ekstasis (Inkwell), Rabbit Room, and elsewhere. She publishes new poems occasionally on her Substack, Lanterns in the Dark.