Oregon Poem

Let's begin with a poem I began writing while in Oregon. I had been walking with my wife along the beach south of the Devil's Punchbowl. We were paying close attention to the characters and to their activities. I was hunting for a poem. After returning to the top of the cliff, we came upon a young man sitting at a picnic table reading his Bible. My first thought? I wished the hand of the Lord had rested so easily on me. In other words, I coveted his life: a Jesus Freak surfer along the Oregon coast. (This is all in the imagination of course--what do I know of his life and trials?) But almost immediately another thought hit me:

What is it that we get from studying the scriptures? I think most people would answer saying something like our LDS definition of truth: a knowledge of things--credo--articles of belief. But I don't think this is what my Jesus Freak took from his Bible. The thing that is before doctrine and beyond creed is the subject of this poem.


The Oregon Poem____________________________


The deep down rumble down
is now a Bible on splintered wood.

In wet olive skin
—as if some seal had come
upon the rock—
his eyes fix on
the swell of words.

Once more into the deep rumble down,
he leans his board into his sense of things.

All souls ride upon a sense of things.

--DJD 7/2006

It is our "sense-of-things" that deepens in prayerful readings of scripture--a sense that cannot mature in creeds and doctrines. A prayerful, silent reading of scripture provides a hollow space (that is, a domestic church) where we experience the wind-words blowing through and feel their intonation.