Lenten Ruth
Around the abandoned well
gallop horse weeds in a tangle that no doubt holds snakes deep within, yet she pulls her way through unafraid. After all, she knows how to take the clearing rake of bronze and catch the writhing serpent, casting it away far overhead so that it slithers back to whence it came long ago in some nearby far-off realm where dew shines like jewels in the morning sun revealing any out-of-place shadows. So she patiently proceeds, not knowing exactly why, except that some Force compels her to make her way in to the well capped like an ancient altar upon which fish were sacrificed for sacred meals. This is not her land, yet she knows its course in her own ancient river of ancestral blood that cries out not for vengeance but restitution, peace. So still she makes her way in, through all the death, rolling away the stone to the sweet aroma of living water at the bottom of the dark, as a flash of light proclaims its rippled praise in earthen rain from above. To most passersby she is itinerant farm worker moving unnoticed across the land. But to those who peer more closely, over the penumbral edge of obscurity she is poet, preacher, love, riding forth on labor's steady Belgian steed of mourning hope in Providence-dripping fields. © 2011 Tess Lockhart. All rights reserved. |