Christie Gardiner - Faith, perhaps

In Christie Gardiner’s “Faith, perhaps”, she shines the yellow-green glow of fireflies on the struggle to retain holiness in one’s life. Describing the sway of feeling and knowing God to feeling as though you’ve been left forsaken and alone by the divine, in “Faith, perhaps” Christie likens that very human struggle between doubt and faith as soldiers marching to war in her mind, and the eventually blessings of God as fireflies strewn across that spiritual battlefield. “This poem marches soldiers across the battlefield of faith considering God’s presence and absence in the speaker’s life,” Christie offered to The Dewdrop.

Faith, perhaps

Oh God, the trilingual interpreter:
You speak the languages of body, mind, and spirit.
Won’t You come again? Why leave me so often,
marooned in the liminal?

What would it be to flit across the days,
like a butterfly bon vivant?
My lot lies in worry; in war.
Dissonant soldiers march
across my frontal lobe, ready for battle.

But then, You. From somewhere
that is everywhere and nowhere,
You reach inside the jar of blessings
from which You scoop a handful of fireflies
to toss onto that patch of grass over there,
Flickering munitions for the cause of peace.
You are here.

My belly unlatches and Your
love takes the front line, unrestrained
I praise You, not in prayer, in full-bodied rapture
to the popping glow of oxygen and luciferin
combining chemically in firefly abdomens.
I Am as You are. I Am You.
For God cannot be separated.
Faith wins the day.

Awe breaks with this thought:
What if You are not found in certainty, but in battle?
I am at it again. Marching. Marching. Marching.
The fireflies have gone dark.
Send reinforcements.

Christie Gardiner

Christie Gardiner is an award-winning author, poet, writer, and performer. Her literary oeuvre includes four ecumenical books (one, currently in its ninth printing), four anthologies, journal publications, booklets, articles, and the writing of her own videocast/podcast. She works in poetry acquisition for Inscape literary journal and holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Utah Valley University. Christie’s current focus is poetry and creative nonfiction that explores the intersection of spirituality, nature, trauma, and healing. Upcoming publication includes her poems, “Theophany,” and “Greyhound to Albany” will be published in The Poetry of Travel in 2024. Christie has received generous support from the New York Writers Institute in 2023, Utah’s Best in State Nonfiction award in 2020, the Ivory Futures Award 2022-2023 and the Capitol Reef Field Station 2023.