Taste (Poem)

By Amirah David

If you were starving in the desert,

I mean so hungry you could no longer lift your own tongue or bones.

If you were so thirsty you’d lost speech and could only dream of water leaking from stones.

And suddenly, at the end of an abandoned road, 

when you were prone to collapse - 

you found an oasis of pools and dates and shade so real it stayed after you closed your sticky eyes…

And it was more than you’d achy prayed all those hot hopeless days.

After you dragged your ragged body and laid it in the lake, 

after you ate your fill of fist figs and dates, 

and drank full till your skin no longer sank between your ribs and shoulder blades, 

and exhaled in the palm shade you would’ve paid your life savings for as you sliced through heat waves believing you might die there - 

tell me plainly…

would you then not use your resurrected strength to run 

and find all your people out there lost and abused in the barren sand?  

Would you not sing out with wild abandon the good news about wellsprings and fruit?

Would you not want to give them the lamp in the dark that lit the path past dry dunes to food and renewal?

And if they refused to listen or believe or follow, wouldn’t you be desperate for them to choose to at least just come - and taste - and see?

To just come check the view before they accuse you of a mirage, or worse, arrogance or sabotage…

Wouldn’t you want them to know you don’t claim to be higher or wiser,

but just another hungry soul trying to show her beloved where she found the whole entire bowl of manna.

Wouldn’t you want to hold it up like a banner, to show how beautiful it is just to behold?

But to follow the light, to find it, to go in and eat, drink, and rest, be blessed, and find life outside the bounded desert of time - this is brave and bold -   

especially in the face of stable misery with its seductive safety of known struggles.

You’d be humbled. 

Wouldn’t you face the sand again and again to take their hand, and meet them in their need?

Gladly feed them a pocket date from the oasis so they could trust it was real - 

and then maybe, come and see.  

Maybe concede, and come and taste.  

And in so doing, find what it is to be loved - 

treated like a queen by the Gardner who's made this place for you, 

who called you there, 

made you for life 

to the fullest on drink and food that is love itself.  

Himself.  

Where all beauty and joy is grown from His hands and calls us back from every distant land.  

Even if it takes baking in the desert, with only one note of hope left to sing us on -

He keeps calling in our thirst.

Let Him sing to you of this burst of life, even if all you can see is desert.  

I know it hurts.  

But it’s closer than we believed at first.  

Search, dear soul, and you will find. 

And it will blow your mind.