And now I'm going to try bed again.

[hermionesviolin]

I don't really understand why I'm still awake. I honestly did go to bed and try to fall asleep.

Getting back up again did mean I had a wonderful brief IM chat with Joe (especially welcome after our last conversation, where I felt like we weren't connecting like we sometimes do).

I'm fond of phone posts and thought about trying to read this poem but decided against it, going instead with a poem by one of the authors I'd used in my 2006 daily Lenten poetry. I apologize for the low volume.

Two Strangers Enter Sodom

Those who'd seen them told the others,
and we gathered at Lot's doorsills
to watch them eat. They had just dipped
their fingers into lentils

and their slender fingers glistened with grease.
Lot bathed their feet, small feet
just barely dulled with earth, releasing
light trapped beneath a sheet

of fine dust. Slowly he released them,
each small foot oiled and dried.
"I want them," someone whispered. Another,
like an ardent echo, sighed.

Another said it openly.
"We want them! Send them out!"
we shouted. We'd seen unearthly beauty
enter a house, bathe, eat,

prepare to sleep. Some might stop at looking,
but others, seeing it,
would reach out and, touching it, they would take it,
even if taking it

destroyed what they desired. We surged
against the strangers, screaming,
and the angels calmly struck us blind
with the light of our own dreaming.

Still reaching out, we touched each other:
coarse cloth, coarse hair, coarse skin—
and cringed from it. We pawed cool air
for the lost celestial men,

whose footfalls faded lighter, lighter
till they were light's own light
departing—or so it seemed to us
in our god-dazzled night.

[by Andrew Hudgins, from Ecstatic in the Poison: new poems (New York: The Overlook Press, 2003) p. 51-2]