Lightning in the Margin

Lightning in the Margin
(In Defense of Scripture Alone)

I have traced corridors quivering with primordial calls
Choruses upon choruses, illusions weaving argentine from ash
Yet their surface warps where certainty cracks,
And all that remains unscathed is the spark of text.

Tomes burdened with commentary glimmer on fraying oak shelves;
They throb in (alcoves: crowned with contradictions
That promise heaven’s banquet yet pour a vacant moan.
Still, I clutch the Word unbridled, rustling pages that breathe.

Observe the tinted shards, how they splinter radiance
Each fragment an echo of origin, shining
Spectrum upon spectrum into mosaic that jars the eye.
But the Lamp once spoken in prophecy yields no divided flicker.

Let Scripture stand as flint forging devotion:
No stray gate beyond the solitary tempest-ravaged Door,
No rival compass but the verse that sculpts the spirit.
Men’s whispers quiver, while that Voice endures unbroken.

I have ingested syllables that rivet the bones,
A hammered anvil shaping law in the blazing wind
Where forbearance prowls like a lion, releasing each sob.
I stand undone, re-fashioned, where the Cross draws me near.

In these lines, the canon roars past static dogma,
Peels veneer from lofty cathedrals, scorches pretend diadems.
The living script, a bristling orchard of unstoppable shoots
Splitting slab, flourishing the gift unearned in the hollows of doubt.

They applaud rites etched in preludes of tradition:
I propose the spring itself molds the the made-to-hold;
Why stitch new edges on a centuries-old trunk
When pure sap alone, unmasked, unalloyed- flows sure?

So I lift these stanzas as pennant, unchained by conclave’s nod,
Nor by echoes of synods dissolving in passing epochs.
This living record shapes me anew, unleashed from labyrinthine decrees,
And at aurora’s horizon, the final say stands entire –

unchallenged.