A GIVEN

                   

 

Every beautiful thing, each star, jubilant wildflower, smiling

eyes of brown or blue shall at another time explode and wilt,

suffering caroms like a freight train storming off shiny tracks,

crashing over the once-solid wooden trestle.

 

This is why we often cower, pulling woven cloth, grandmother’s

afghan over tender heads, hoping beating hearts somehow survive

unwanted onslaughts that always do at some time come.

 

And often did come to beloved ancestors—

grandparents, aunts and uncles, many others

far far beyond where empty space holds stars

that flare forth like lanterns who spark and dim,

spark again, penetrating our sight long after

their apparent divorce from cosmos, a galaxy’s

certain demise.

 

Yes, they who sat untold decades with gods of loss, of piled ash,

thin shards of memory within rock walls that crumbled to dust

while a gaping sky without words of solace thrusts sheets of gray

at faces wordlessly staring at riverbeds of drought, those granite dams 

of shambled desire.

 

And still, and still, beauty blooms blossoming tendrils, beads of moisture  

towards spirals of flourishing. This too glistens, can be counted on.

If not always, often, if we but taste to see, feel to listen. Stars beckon,

welcome from innermost immensities as all women and men, every creature

now know in their bones, quiet as streams, nourishing gifts proffered by unseen hands.

 

Inexplicable echoes of what was explored before vibrate into feasts

of becoming. Not always our particular past but the storms, strife and triumphs—

anguishments married to infinities of contentment---

 

meandering tracks set down by ancestors--loggers, mothers, teachers,

engineers, nurses, poets, pool hall owners-- as we tomorrow work,

now walk this earth to genuflect, bowing both to mundane tasks

and transcendent moments, attentively traversing love-fed fields

of every near, far-flung season.