I'm learning we can escape
the confines of these eyes and ears
and erase the dossier of limitations and fears
they've compiled in self-consciousness—
even reverse the fatal conviction based on it.
The key:
like sunlight and sun,
man and God are ever at one.
I've found that every time I deny this
and drag out a record of failure as evidence
of our estrangement,
I convict myself again,
sentence myself again
remand myself again
to a dismal prison
of time and space and mortal men.
But every time I accept this key,
or at least try to grasp it
and use it,
loving and forgiving my way through each day,
I feel a little more like a wayward one
returned to my father's house:
loved and forgiven
and free again.
As gleam upon gleam breaks the cage of night,
each dawn of this truth
brings increasing release,
and more proof for the promise that
when this light in me is fully risen
I'll see: there isn't a prison.
