Shadow In The Doorway

© 2006, Carl Thomas Gladstone

Dear sister, soldier, friend;
that shadow in your doorway
is no slave thing anymore
no thief nor conspirator
rather my own heart
powerless before you.

Now I am bold without command
so I will save decree;
let your "Jesus Loves Me" drive you.
But by way of aide memoire:
Freedom for this One my son
is freedom all around.

Pull them through the rectangle timbers
that open to your soul
let love and not one other thing
make itself at home.

He turned my prison bars
to curtains across a private cove,
the mat and stone into a cushion and a bed,
Would that I could keep him here,
that these amenities remain,
but know he'll flip your house the same.

Grab him from the night of cold and chains,
embrace and move toward the hearth
where warmth and light and friends
can melt the frostbit parts
and glow within each other's eyes
as they will then in mine.

Me, he, and JC, Martin Luther King and Ghandi
Rosa and Malcolm and all the beautiful Peo-
ple, pull them all in and LOVE.

One more thing
my gratitude of course will sail
in on the chill that open door admits,
come tomorrow, come tomorrow, come tomorrow.

*  Philemon
**  For Mark Sheets and his friend Onesimus