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.
