Shoutout to Maddie Wilcox for providing the rough draft and collaborating with me!
Psalm 101
I
Gated garden of love,
I sing of you.
Lover-judge,
You grow me into song.
I think long upon the pathway.
At what moment does the divided path
unify into paradox?
At what point do these many steps
coalesce into perfection?
Oh, I wish the way were a man.
I wish the garden were a man,
and the gate.
I wish he would meet me here,
that walking with
him would be walking in
the way, would be enough.
II
Until then,
I will build a wall about my heart,
about my house;
I will guard the garden
you have given me.
Keep out, cheap imaginings!
Keep out, clinging dirt of the fallen!
Keep out, twisted minds!
I would know nothing of wickedness,
inside or out.
These I hate and these I will destroy:
The whisperers and prigs,
the secret bearers and their bending eyes of pride.
Wickedness blooms silent
upon their false branches;
the wind carries their pollen
for miles, staining every uncovered thing.
III
I long to live among the faithful,
with those who walk barefoot
upon the pathway of paradox,
who look to the Garden and the Gardener,
who enter at the Gate.
Yet I know I could not enter
Unless You, the Gardener
Had made the way first.
I used to be a wicked weed,
A thorn of pride
So You banished me from Eden
But You the Gardener
Met me in the wilderness of Exile
And lived without a trace
Of the dirt of wickedness
And in Gethsemane
You prepared to make the way, the Gate.
On the cross, my thorns of pride
Became the crown that pierced Your head
The Gardener bled, died and rose that I might enter
The Garden of His Presence.
IV
Come, my friends, tend with me the seeds
that God has planted.
Teach me how to grow.
But the devious,
the pretenders—
their lies shall never scale these walls,
their false faces I refuse to meet with mine.
Each morning I rise to tear the wicked from the land like weeds.
I cut down those who do evil;
they fall like kudzu1 ripping from the wall.
An invasive vine that grows everywhere in the South.
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