Fingernails
It’s unorthodox, this constant life
Its interior ocean
Washing up tides, with
Winds from nowhere
Surfing waves that carry
A heart, a will, far beyond:
The trick, it seems, is to wait
The me-in-me wanted to
Travel into Arabia with the apostle
Fresh from Damascus
Or with David into Adullam
Or the Messiah away from it all
With the wild beasts of
Heaven and earth
But mostly the apostle
What happened there, Paul?
In Arabia?
And all the time
Like some drugged sluggard
Like Frodo with a ring too heavy
I am helpless
And cannot be enthused,
Rocking in the sedative
Of some interior ocean wave
And in its place a manky image
Of ordinariness gone wild
Seemingly unworthy of
Contemplation, but
This thought will not rot
‘If you want to know about
All things’, it says
‘Look under your fingernails
Look in places no one else will
Rummage away in bins, or, like
A five-year-old nestling
On a carpet
Feet twitching on the sofa
Rolling plasticine balls
Or folding and refolding
Silver foil, lost in wonder;
Then you’ll know all things.’
That day, under my fingernails
Lay foreign DNA, the
Fragment of another’s hair,
The innards of a wasp
Clapped to infinity
Some earwax, tile cement,
And salt from Beer Beach:
A sharper, more vivid log
Than my phone history.
Thank God.
And so I let Arabia subside
To learn what I needed to learn
To find what I’m looking for
Treasure lying in strange places
A Messiah in a manger,
A food trough, surrounded by
Angels and steaming dung,
Frankincense and stinking hay
There, ridiculously there,
On a remote Judean hillside
He’s a hunter, that Messiah,
A treasure hunter,
A finder, a fingernail finder,
A proof of incarnation
A prostitute here, a leper there
A Pharisee-by-night…Nicodemus…
…there’s a bit of him
In us all.
But only some go searching
Will we find Him hiding in you?
Under your fingernails
His DNA?
Inadvertently transferred
When your heart
Last reached out to Him
Not kneeling, or in a
Sanctuary made by man,
But in your tidal unorthodoxy
Something undeniable
A zephyr, a breath,
A breeze that made you
Look up.