hushed tears swell, words without voice

from a well sacred in my breast.

there's a tugging in my heart

as the Ralphian strings twine like cords

drawing affection from a sanctuary

deserted of prayer and long forgot.

a needling dream rises to the air:

an eagle's flight, an up-draft hawk

swept beyond the reach of wings

beyond the echo of their call.

i know not what cry to sound

wandering 'round the airy chords

nudging my mind, my thoughts to heights unseen

my soul to the Center long untouched.

my lost-ness wanders through a dark wood

blackness blinding what Light surrounds.

my feet shuffle in the night-time of my wanting.

the night-stars shine as to offer hope.

an Ascending Lark sings amidst the strings.

i hear Her voice saying, "Come!

run till you drop, drenched in tears of release

sweated, bathed, filled with your longing."

oh, Beautiful Love, it's You tugging at my soul:

Your voice of assurance, Your invitation to sup

Your wine of plenty, the peace of Your hearth.

i hear.  i come.  i run to Your heart

released, naked, straight to Your arms.

i feel Your warm Breath caring about me

your Flame-embrace fueling my within.

*Observations of Frederick Buechner:

  -I've seen the not all that pretty girls and less than good-looking boys - many of them hardly more than children, runaways - trying to keep alive by clumsily, shiftily selling themselves for lack of 

anything else too sell; and staggering around in the midst of it all, or slumped like garbage against the fronts of buildings, the Forty-Second Street drunks - not amiable, comic drunks you can kid yourself into passing with a smile, but angry, blood shot, crazy drunks, many of them blacks because blacks in New York have more to be angry and crazy about than the rest of us.

  -What scared the daylights out of me was to see suddenly how drawn we all are, I think, to the very things that appall us - to see how beneath our civilizedness, our religiousness, our humanness, there is that in all of us which remains uncivilized, religionless, subhuman, and which hungers for precisely the fare that Forty-Second Street offers, which is basically the license to be subhuman not just sexually but any other way that appeals to us - the licence to use and exploit and devour each other like savages, to devour and destroy our own sweet selves.  And if you and I are tempted to think we don't hunger for such things, we have only to remember some of the dreams we dream and some of the secrets we keep and the battle against darkness we all of us fight.  I was scared stiff that I would somehow get lost in that awful place and never find my way out.  I was scared that everybody I saw coming toward me down the crowded sidewalk - old and young, well dressed and ragged, innocent and corrupt - was in danger of getting lost.  I was sacred that the world itself was as lost as it was mad.  And of course in a thousand ways it is.