Journal Of A Miracle (For Brother Russell) Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

What if you're offered a page of words
a friend has written,
and you let yourself take it home for
the possible edification of your wife and yourself,
and what you expected it to be just one
or two was unexpectedly discovered
to be a great many?

And what if most of its sentences were not
simple: subject, object and verb,
with no more than one
dependent clause, and most of them
ran on and on, and you find that the point
in the one that you're reading now,
was in no way set up
in the one you just read,

and as you are realizing this,
you come to understand
that there is no coherence
in any of it? And what if in the middle
of everything, you just find yourself lost?

Well, my friend, what if your friend
is not really that much
of a writer... what if rather, he
is just some kind of thinker, who can't write?
And the ideas he's given you threaten to add
up to something that's going to be great?

But then... what if he can't really think
either? What if, if God held a thinking bee,
and he were in it... in the first round,
probably he wouldn't be able
to think his way on to round two?

But then... then what if what
he is trying to say one day suddenly,
without any warning just showed up
in his head, and not knowing where it came from
and unable to weigh the heft of its import
or trace any sure path from anything in it,
to anything in anything else? What if all
he wanted to do is to just, in anyway possible,
somehow just get the whole mess of it out?

And so you've got it now, so he's got it
out to you. So now then, What do you think?
did the job that was needed, get itself done?

What if, what is now required, is your word...
some kind of word back to him?
What if you think what
he's given you maybe
has something, but you can't give it
enough of your time,
so you can't properly follow it out?

But then what if, in fact, it's nothing?
Nothing... not anything at all?
What if, on top of that you don't
really know him
all that well? What if, in fact,
at the bottom line,
he's not all that much of a friend?

The fact is, that whatever a thing like this is,
really is not in any of it's content.
It is in that, which is around all real things...
the spirit of God: alive in the working
and alive in the play.
What if the greatest thought ever thought up,
before it was heard by any, was once on a page
being held for the reading of just one?
Every man of us is an idiot, until anyone else
comes to agree with what's in his head.

It's not the making of all of the distances
to infinity, to the final end points
of the cosmos, if they're there,
or to the original start or final conclusion of time
that amazes so much.... It's how, whatever is in
the secret space of any one human mind, can
just show up somewhere else... anywhere, it has
never been before. That is, I think,
the real miracle in the whole nature of God.

What if, what someone like me is thinking
that gets written down, could be
the best thing there is or ever was?
What if the whole world of the future
will eventually have to adapt to it and learn?
And what if in doing so, a lot of things
get better, and all the corrections
to the misunderstandings it makes, makes
them grow even more?
Then someone will have to explain it
to all of the neophytes then, just who
is going to handle that?

You?

Well, what if you might be just one pickle short
of a Big Mac. And not the sharpest knife
in the drawer, or any of the hundreds
of things like that I might say,
and you know some too. But both of us
have such limited time, and at least one
of us, I think, must have a real life.

But if something I thought, wrote or said
ever comes up requiring an account of itself,
you can send any questioners to me. And don't worry.
I can handle it for now.
I'll just make something up.