Come Stumbling

come forth from the wilderness,
from your failure of faith.
What do you see?  What do you hear?
are you looking back? you camped here
before your children were born,
before they were grown,
you bathed your daughter in a blackened bucket
on this picnic table, under the sun.
years later,
you camped here and awoke  to a morning like this
with her children playing when they were small.

are you looking ahead,
will they camp here when you are gone?
drought and famine have not reached us here
but there are rumors on the borders
wrinkled skin, the failure of cherished assumptions,

yet every morning  rises Golgotha and the empty tomb,
eternal songs redeeming life,
a choral concert streams across the universe,
the  midnight miserere
the golden hallelujah!