Come to my house

Poem by Dana Littlepage Smith

Some would number us
in lost accounting piles:
a wind toppled abacus of old Quakers.

Our vestments of truth may be
frayed to lace, the burlap of equality
clotted with centuries of mistakes.

Some ask, ‘What was it all for anyway,
The yea and the nay,
the quiet hours millioned into history?

The musty halls, the steeple house
of orchards where spiders swayed,
what hill was ever moved by all

of those years of listening?
Children of light, dim, died or scattered,
kinder ground trod into battled paths…

What particulars were ever laid down
into the regulating of things,
what witness, like a web

is still spirit-ready to be lifted? 
And if a president or Lord Protector
now should say, Come again to my house,

what extinction would be slowed?
What slaughter averted?’
Heavy-bellied questions

stumble blind, while
the widow’s mite echoes
in the mind of things given.

The footprints of Lazarus still blaze
in desert dust, waiting
to spark fire in imagination.

Unbranded, barely noticed,
no hole bored through
the tongue, our lives

speak like stars, legion,
contracting, yet the slow
burn of radiance still radiant;

the particles of silence, still praising.

Dana says, ‘The particulars in the poem refer to George Fox’s “Fifty nine Particulars laid down for the Regulating of things”. The poem’s title comes from Oliver Cromwell’s words to Fox after their first meeting: “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”.’

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