Wandering Ruminations

“Wandering Ruminations” began as “Concerns of the Wandering Thinker,” a poem I wrote at Tufts while studying Judaic Studies and taking a poetry class. I later published it in ManuScrita, where it opens the section “Lost Psalms of the Hebrews.”

The poem asks what it means to remain devoted when prayer is met with silence. Its speaker believes he belongs to a chosen people, yet struggles to feel close to the God he addresses.

The original poem

“Concerns of the Wandering Thinker” from ManuScrita (2023)

Amidst my bleeding, my devotion burns,
But does He notice or even care?
I plead in prayer, yet silence returns,
Leaving me in torment and despair.
Has He, not the time to see,
All I do for Him on my dime?
I would cross a swampy sea
for even a sliver of the sublime.
He’ll take my life one day,
that’s the way it goes.
He giveth and taketh this body of clay.
But I endure knowing we are the people He chose.
He appears as a mirage, elusive and unclear.
What is my place in His realm, I can’t see it, I fear.
Does He manifest life from the Heavens I dream,
as I picture the infinite from life's limited stream?
Do we each feel the other, in endless reflection?
Am I merely His divine projection?
Am I in his image I wonder,
or is He in mine to self-discover?

From poem to song

For the song, I reshaped the poem’s language while keeping that question at its center. The opening becomes more conversational, and the distance feels immediate: “Still I endure for we’re the people he chose, though his face feels so far away.”

Covenant of Freedom was the first Dust & Clay album I created. Production edits led to its release as the third album, but this track reaches back to one of my early poems and the questions that first drew me to write.