Biblical, he says, but I wonder:
what does he mean?
Many things are written in the Scriptures.
Creation stories, tales of destruction,
instructions to throw stones, appeals to love above all else...
Like a dreaming child collecting wildflowers in a sprawling field
do we pick through the holy pages
to find what is sacred and beautiful,
streams of words like stems and blooms
to tuck behind our ears.
(Though, it is worth reminding...
once separated from the ground--
since sentences are soil--
the blossom will soon die.)
Perhaps he would have admired
a different flower than the one
I found. Yet still we hold hands,
dancing in tall grass.
What fragrance, what sort of beliefs
do you want to close your eyes and
inhale until the scent covers the world?
-Hillary
Interesting thoughts, although I don't get the reference to sentences as soil.
ReplyDeleteI meant that surrounding sentences and context around a verse are like the soil around a flower. If the verse is the flower, if we pluck it out of context, it can lose parts of its meaning.
DeleteOf course, there is no perfect metaphor. :-) This is just one I decided to toy with tonight. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for explaining. To me it just didn't scan with the rest of the metaphor, which I took pretty much as you meant it.
ReplyDelete