Meditations

Healing
is always a miracle,
a weaving back to life,
the new bloom of work
that can be done.
Of days that can 
be sung.

FIVE MEDITATIONS FOR ONE DAY

I
Three sturdy robins, a puddle shining clean
from the night’s rash storm
and I had just prayed
for the gray to rise:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
I thought, on a dare,
and they lifted off,
bathed and silver-winged
in new light, sustained.

II
Clean morning rising over 
the hard sparkle of snow,
the lab dog is drunk with scent,
I, giddy with a fresh start.
The sky dimpled and shy can’t help
letting in yellow light, gold notions,
true speaking in the brisk.

III
I practice cryogenics
in my kitchen,
the yeast in its cold package from the freezer
resurrecting in the pocked mud
colonies and miraculous loaves
to cradle the thawing fishes.

God I have loved

in the gold morning
raising, across the bends
of earth, her roots,
her autumn trees, 
the deep-gold affirm
of life-at-resistance, 
and, at last,
in the soft still
of late afternoon,
at-rest.
In the purple sky, stars
straining through the cold
reveal the shapes
of human story.

God I have loved
autumn evenings
in earth’s gold passionate
mind and in the human intimacies--
crumbs on a table,
the orchid’s curl,
a feeder readied for finches,
shoes in a communal line,
an iron set to steam a shirt--
the dear taking care,
the order-making, 
light against dark 
and rubble and deep space.

Winter Window
(The small world becomes the expanded world, confinement an opening to vast space and time and all the weight and all the flights it allows and to which it bears witness.)

Small Prayer in February, Morning

The day straight as a stick
bent itself, toward evening,
to listen to the twist 
of human words lamplit,
then tumbled through the night.