“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:17–18).
There is something small about the love of God.
I clamber up a few rocks, walk a hundred yards
through pink sand, then feel the canyon walls
converge on my shoulders. Just skin, hawk song,
my blood pounding against fossils in the dark,
my only movements my hands channeling the marrow
of sandstone. I can look nowhere but up the sheer red walls
pocked and hallowed by chronicles of rain,
forever closing but never touching,
in the gap the whole sky caught.
Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air as well as How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry.”
Inspired by Jenny's Canyon, Snow Canyon State Park, Utah. From Second Sky by Tania Runyan (Cascade Books, 2013). Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Scripture epigraph added by the editors.
