At the end of your ten day meditation retreat
You got in your car, drove 30 peaceful feet, and ran over a bird
Splayed its holy guts on the pavement like God fingerpainting "Fuck you" across that deep breath you were holding the way your mother held her first born
You
Thank goodness
Were torn from the Bible the day before they burned it for that verse about dancing to tambourines
Once, you saw the blood of Christ on a knife carving Redwood trees into church pews
Now every Sunday morning you hear glaciers melting
And you cry easy as a one-night stand never ever is
When you see the feathers in your rearview mirror
Scattering like prayers
Searching for a safe place to land
Hold me to my word when I tell you I will leave today
Catch a bus ticket west just to stand in the center of that highway
Stopping traffic till every feather's answered
I've seen too many prayers caught in the grills of 18-wheelers
And folks like us, we've got shoulder blades that rust in the rain
But they're still G-sharp, whenever our spinal cords are tuned to the key of redemption
So go ahead world, pick us
To make things better
We've been building a bridge through the center of this song since Mother Teresa replaced the walls of her church with the weeping cries of Calcutta's orphaned ghettos
You wanna know what the right wing never got?
We never question the existence of God
What we question is his bulldozer, turning Palestine into a gas chamber
What we question is the manger in Macy's, and the sweat shops our children call the North Pole
What we question is a burka hiding 60 swollen lashes on the back of a woman found guilty of the crime of allowing herself to be brutally raped
What we question is the idea of Heaven having gates
Silly
Have you never stood on the end of a pier watching the moon live up to her name?
Have you never looked into the eyes of a thief and seen his children's hungry bellies?
Some days, my heart beats so fast, my rib cage sounds like a fucking railroad track
And my breath is a train I just can't catch
So when my friends go filling their lungs with "Yes"
When they're peeling off their armor and falling like snowflakes, on your holy tongue
God
Collect the feathers
We are thick skin covering nothing but wishbones
Break in
You'll find notebooks full of jawlines we wrote to religion's clenched fist
Yeah, we bruise easy
But the sound of our bouncing back is a Grand Canyon full of choir claps
And our five-pointed stars have always been open to the answer
Whatever it is
I know David argued with the chisel
I know he said "Make me softer. When those tourists come looking for a hero, I want the rain to puddle in my pores"
Build me holy like that
Build me a kite flown out a bedroom window at midnight, the day freedom set its curfew to 9:11
My Heaven is a snowglobe
The blizzard will always be worth the touch of a hand
Shaking me awake like a boy taking deep breaths
All the way down to the dents in his shins
Like he's building a telephone from a string and two tin cans
He knows God's number by heart
He knows it isn't listed in any book
Look me in the bullseye
In the laws I broke and the promises I didn't
In the batteries I found when the lights went out, and the prayers I found when the brakes did too
I got this moment
And no idea how it will end
But every second of this life is scripture
And to know that, trust me, we don't need to be born
Again