Beauty for Ashes

I found this poem from last year and wanted to post it. Maybe you have felt the same things at times?

I gathered all my strength and tried to raise up from the ashes. I held ashes in my hands and raised them up to Him
“Here, take these ashes– I screamed!”
“Give me beauty,” I belted.
I glimpsed at the altar of tears.
An ocean of bottles.
My breath trapped inside one container.

I dragged one leg and limped to the throne room.
It was there that I mourned the loss of everything.
Every title
Every child I carried in the womb
Every house, home, and lineage
Every gift
Every friend
Every Judas
I broke open like an alabaster box and poured my soul on the bottom perch before the Lamb that had been slain.

“Give me beauty,” I moaned.
His gentle eyes were piercing through me.
“Give me oil for this heaviness,” I wept.

I pawed the earth like a horse who’d been shot.
I scraped my boils with pottery and whispered a faint
“The Lord Adonai has given,
And He has taken away,
Blessed be the Name!”
“Baruch HaShem!”
I bound up my heart with bandages, and still, the blood ran
I opened the Psalms, and He told me I had forgotten how He parted the sea,
Spared me of death–
Covered my sins–
Bathed me and cut my umbilical cord.
How He covered me with His skirts and anointed me with oil.

Then suddenly–
I felt chains snap!
My wrist a bloody mess–
My hair unkempt–
My mouth in need of fiery coals from the altar.
Place them on my tongue, I plead.
When will you come again and pick me up and carry me off? From this vast wasteland?
He waited until I was 99 years old.
My dried up womb–
My dried up pen–
My dried up exhausted spirit met first fruits morning,
Then, Suddenly–
The sky opened up,
A fountain broke forth from the deep and poured healing waters over my head!
Baruch HaShem!
“Thirsting for God in Trouble and Exile.

For the choir director. A Maskil of the sons of Korah.

1As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So my soul pants for You, O God.
2My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God?

3My tears have been my food day and night,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”

4These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me.
For I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God,
With the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

5Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.

6O my God, my soul is in despair within me;
Therefore I remember You from the land of the Jordan
And the peaks of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

7Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls;
All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me.

8The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime;
And His song will be with me in the night,
A prayer to the God of my life.

9I will say to God my rock, “Why have You forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”

10As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries revile me,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”

11Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him,
The help of my countenance and my God.” Psalm 42, NASB).

bottles–Bhavyesh Acharya

Lamb–Sam Carter

tears–Aliyah Jamoushttps://unsplash.com/@aliyahjam

Water/ rainbow Jared Erondu

bloody wrist–Valentin Salja