"Hymnal for the Almost-Returned" by David Anson Lee

I keep finding God
in the wrong places:

in grocery aisles where fluorescent light
blesses nothing in particular,

in the pause between voicemail and apology,
that held breath
with no doctrine inside it.

Once, I thought belief was a door:
open or shut,
hinged on certainty.

Now it is a hinge still warm
from a hand that left too quickly.

My mother’s voice arrives in weather reports:
not warnings, exactly,
more like permission:

“Rain tonight. Pray if you want.”

I don’t correct her anymore.

There was a time I kept score:
who left, who stayed,
who was saved by language
and who by silence.

But memory stops arguing.

Even “lost” begins to sound like a place
I passed through once
without noticing the exit.

At dinner, someone says grace
without naming anything:
just a tilt of the head toward the table,
toward what is here
without instruction.

And I understand, briefly,
how leaving is not always departure.

Sometimes it is learning
to listen
without translation.

I do not miss what I cannot name.

Only this:
how light still behaves like blessing
even when no one is speaking.

If there is a hymn left in me,
it is not about return.

It is about staying long enough
for silence
to stop feeling like exile.

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