Return to Dust - Return to God

lectionary poem for Ash Wednesday (A)

I found myself returning to the sonnet form again this week. There is something about its small, steady shape that feels right for a day like Ash Wednesday, when we are asked to face things we usually keep at a distance.

The phrase that kept echoing as I wrote was the one I speak over beloved people when the ash is placed on their foreheads. “Remember that you are dust.”

Over time it began to sound less like a warning and more like a direction.

Return to dust.

Return to God.

Because the dust we return to is the same earth God once knelt to shape and breathe into, soil that still carries the memory of his touch. This poem is simply an attempt to sit with that ancient sentence long enough for it to feel not only honest about our ending, but strangely gentle about where we are going.

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Return to Dust
Return to God

Not as a threat, but as a tenderness
the ash is laid upon the warming skin,
a priestly thumb that will not let us guess
how death and mercy now are folded in.
“Return to dust,” the ancient sentence said,
as though the earth were exile, not our home;
yet dust is where the breath of God was spread,
the place from which the living ones are grown.

Return to dust, return to God — the same,
for earth still hums with what Divine hands have made;
no fall can shake the Root from which we came,
no grave outwait the Love in which we’re laid.
O mark us now, not only as we die,
but as the soil where hidden mercies lie.