Turning thunder into grace

GOSPEL SALT

  by Andrea Gibson

Sometimes I get so nervous when I speak

I can feel my heartbeat in my tongue.

And my heartbeat talks faster than an auctioneer

but this is the last place

I would ever try to sell you something from.

When I get really scared

I imagine my grandmother

is standing behind me

with her pipe-organ arms

hugged tight around my chest.

She says, “Listen, I know you run your mouth

so your mind can rest.”

Now rest

is no broken levy staring up at the water.

It is the bite marks a mother leaves on the hurricane

while her daughter climbs to the 9^th ward rooftop

to spray paint, “We are still here.”

Yes we are.

While some days we will barely get our feet wet

most of the time we’ll have to wake

and shake the tidal wave off our music stands

to make space for the notes

of a brass-knuckled saxophone

carrying the tattered hope

of the ocean’s prayer.

All these words

are just paper boats praying they can get there.

Tell me we will get there

before we come up broke,

believing that people, like levies

have to hold themselves together

when often it’s the falling apart

that gives them grace

that ensures no one ever

builds a condo over their open hearts.

Three years after Katrina

I found a sea shell

beneath an oak tree in New Orleans City Park.
I can still hold it to my ear

and hear the song the folk singer sang

the night she left so much blood on her guitar strings

and I knew I have never been touched right,

knew we could be instruments

if we could just let our kite strings

be turned by the lightning.

Tune me to the thunder.

I am already shaking like a matador’s hands

like California shook in the 1906 earthquake

when 28,000 building fell

and the people said, “When 28,000 buildings fall

do you know how many walls are no longer there?”

All that was left between them

was the gospel salt of their sweat

as the carried each other from the rubble to the street

where each night they carried the piano

to be played by a new refugee.

Some wishes can only be made on the stars’ dust.

I know most of the time my shine

cannot hold a match to my rust.

So ask me about the rain.

I’ll tell you my mother says, “The thing

about wheelchairs is they keep you looking up.”

Says, “Forests may be gorgeous

but there’s nothing more alive than a tree

that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”

So when my grandmother died

I started wearing her thimbles on my fingers

when I’d type out poems,

hoping every key I’d type

would sound like a footstep of someone coming home,

the way my friend came home from Iraq

and named his baby daughter Viva.

We have all fought for our lives

more than we know,

survived our own questions.

How does one grieve a poisoned sea, a bleeding gulf?

can even the moon handle the kind of gravity,

that pull to surrender?

I say science can spit an atom.

But what if Eve could put Adam back together

by reminding him the garden is just a seed

sometimes so small it can fit on the tip of your tongue?

Say, “flint.”

Say, “spark.”

Say this is me hitchhiking with a green thumb,

hoping to grow something in the trust

of someone picking me up

on a day I have fallen for the wreckage.

Remind me

that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

Plant my feet in the one thing that flowers

when everything else erupts. Usman,

an immigrant from Pakistan,

could not stop saying, “Brother, Brother, Brother,”

to the Jewish man whose hand he held

down ninety-eight flights of stairs

to escape the fall of the Twin Towers.

That is the only hour I can set my heart to.

The moment we realize sometimes

it is the metal in the wind chimes that reminds us

how soft the breeze is.

And maybe my grandmother only believed in Jesus

because she believed He came back

wearing that whip on his back like a halo.

Either way, this world

has picked me enough times for the madness vase

for me to know sanity is not

running from the window when the lightning comes.

It’s turning the thunder into grace,

knowing sometimes the break in your heart

is like the hole in the flute.

Sometimes it’s the place

where the music comes through.