The Vineyard That Bore No Fruit

There was a vineyard where no grapes were grown,
Yet every autumn hands came stained with wine;
The leaves remembered names the roots had known,
Though every branch denied the ancient sign.

A shepherd walked with sunlight on his brow,
His voice was softer than the evening rain;
The sparrows kissed the furrows of his plough—
Yet something darker harvested the grain.

The bells were neither warning nor delight;
They tolled like water dreaming it was stone.
Each prayer became a feather dressed in white,
Each feather drifted farther from its bone.

I thought the gate was fashioned out of oak,
But every hinge was fastened to the air.
The elders smiled whenever silence spoke,
As though a wound itself were something fair.

Who was it first that whispered to the vine
That blood could bloom where mercy should have been?
The clusters bowed as if before a shrine,
And called their dying "washing from all sin."

Perhaps you drank beside that crimson press.
Perhaps I did. I cannot truly say.
The cup remembers more than we confess;
The lips forget what echoes choose to stay.

There came a child who carried only light,
No scripture written underneath his skin.
The vineyard watched him as one fears the sight
Of dawn exposing where the dark has been.

The keeper raised his weather-beaten hand;
The crows became a parliament of prayer.
He promised every soul a promised land,
Yet built his kingdom from their hidden despair.

His robe was woven out of borrowed flame,
Its hem embroidered deep with borrowed tears.
He taught the frightened how to bless his name,
Then harvested the tribute of their fears.

The moon looked down and could not find the field;
The stars refused to gather where they shone.
Even heaven's patient face seemed half concealed,
As though it mourned a vineyard not its own.

Tell me—

Who buried altars underneath the wheat?
Who crowned the wolf and named him faithful guide?
Who taught the lamb its trembling was complete
Only when it learned to praise the knife beside?

I have seen roots that feed upon the dead,
Though every blossom smelled of morning dew.
The sweetest hymns are sometimes softly fed
By mouths that never loved the God they knew.

And still the vines keep reaching toward the sun,
As if forgiveness grew from every scar.
Yet somewhere every harvest is begun
Long before the reapers know they are.

Should you arrive where gentle voices sing,
Do not mistake their gentleness for grace.
Some gardens bloom because beneath each spring
Another season vanished without trace.

For there are vineyards older than the earth,
Where fruit is weighed by something none can see;
And there are men who counterfeit rebirth
By hanging borrowed heavens on a tree.

But every root remembers every hand.

The soil keeps every covenant of dust.

When masks decay, the branches understand

They never carried saints—

Only hunger...

Disguised

As trust.