Places 15: Waiting for Wind
Note: Here are two poems. The 2011 poem describes summer heat. The 2021 version is a work in progress. Inner impressions that surfaced while reading Carl Trueman’s The Life of the Mind slipped in. Trueman says our culture elevates immanence (materialism), unbelief, and the importance of our inner individual feelings and physical desires over external authorities like Biblical revelation, natural reason and objective truth. If so, I’m a a relic— full of faith in the life and work of the Son of an All- Powerful God, Who is Spirit and Truth and Who created and sustains the universe by Love. So I suppose it’s natural for my troubled attitudes about environmental abuse and the changing beliefs and values of our modern world to come out in a simple poem about summer heat. But it surprised me. I wanted to change a line or two—to make a few lines “nicer.” I didn’t, in hopes that someone will one day read those lines and hear the voice of God calling them to arise and follow Him. Fortunately, the poem ends with hope.
2011
Hot air weighs upon these grasslands
Presses along the fence lines
Covers the treetops
Falls thick upon the fields
Higher, above, it tries in vain to rise—
While around me steam ponders, slow,
Glides densely through our hollows,
Settles into sinkholes
Moves in heaves—
to swell the heating land with heaviness
Incubating me in time and place
with pregnant wait.
Ginny Emery©
2021
Heavy air weighs on these grass lands,
presses along the fence lines,
covers the treetops,
rests on the fields.
High above, hot skies choke dry,
breath droops, to fall
on toxic crops
striving to survive
in shriveling ground
Slumping through hollows,
settling into sinkholes,
strange stupors sweat across an earth
that once supported families,
honored lives once joined for birth.
The spirits of our day deny
that we were born to glorify
the loving laws of God, Most High—
not our minds and moods.
Strange airs,
blanketing crops with heaviness,
drug reapers, born twice to truth,
into sleepy indifference—
hearts iced to the heats of hell,
turn human passions,
inside out until desires rise to rule.
Have ancient wells run dry
in heats too hot to think
beyond the human self,
too hot to think of holy love,
too hot to even think
that souls of men
are parching
on the brinks of unbelief
in all beyond themselves,
in all they cannot see or feel?
But yet—may faith and hope awake
and rise, to stir and breathe and see—
that God—yes— God—
Believed in or Not—
brings increasing pressure
sends increasing heat—
(not patterns simply rearranged
by people blaming climate change)
He’s incubating time and place
in pregnant wait
for us to catch His wind.
© Ginny Emery
The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” John 3:8 BSB
This is what the Lord GOD says to these bones: “I will cause breath to enter you, and you will come to life. . . . I will put breath within you so that you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD. ” Ezekiel 37: 5, 6 BSB
Suddenly a sound like a mighty rushing wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. Acts 2:2 BSB
