Home
Is where the trees
You planted
15 years ago
Bless you
and your neighbors
With blossoms
and shade
And where you sit
riding out rainy days
While kids sort socks
And pie bakes in the kitchen
just because it’s Sunday
and you had all the ingredients.
And home is also home
if none of these things follow you,
If you wander or flee or sojourn
hoping for a world in which we all
find rest together at the end
of a long and nameless road.
There is nothing visible to clue them in,
No sunlight, flowers, or flush of leaves,
Yet the frogs cry out from pools and puddles
Peeping up to find a mate, start life afresh
In unthought expectation of spring.
In the fog and cold rain that pelts my face—
Drops at maximum density—
Their song knows embodied what I know but
Do not act upon. Winter’s scarcity ends,
Warmth returns, and plans are now called for
To welcome the abundance of summer.
Originally posted here
Bless the rainy days
That interrupt the careful dance of plans
Pushing you into
Attention to other lives, other needs,
And back to your soul.
Bless the quiet drone
Of branches dripping on foggy windows,
That make you look out
On the familiar, damply rearranged
To absorb your stress.
Bless the gift of God
Poured out on the righteous and unrighteous
To soothe aching roots
And prepare the wintering world to rest,
Rebuilding its love.
Bless the sunny days
That catch your face in their hands and lift it
To see in clear light
Every texture and color and shadow,
Even of your heart.
Bless the blinding blue
Of a sky scrubbed clean enough to see through
Right up to heaven
And reflect incomprehensible depth
In each frost crystal.
Bless the gift of God
Shined down on the righteous and unrighteous
To warm and to fill,
Stirring the air to life for all creatures,
Under rays of peace.
Image: Delighted Child in Rain, Hamilton County, Tenn., September 2022.
or “Aaron’s Beard Redux: Psalm 133.5“
The sun seeps contently across a thousand “heads,”
Spits of earth bathed gently by precious light that spreads
From the ocean inland down on cornfields, swamps, woods
And then, as on command, dawns to wake neighborhoods.
Above false light-rings snuffed by rising of the day,
Soft pink cloud-beards, puffed, shine back above the gray
About mountain collars transformed by the first rays
That hit peaks and hollers to Appalachian blaze.
Here beyond hills glowing, I watch the red-orange ooze
Spill down, slipping, slowing, toward misty valley blues,
Now casting blades of grass bowed with drops of dew
As countless beads of glass making the scene brand new.
Tomorrow they’ll reset and pull it off again,
Cycling without regret nature’s unfeigned amen.
Each day cries out wonder, sprouting what joy we’ve squirreled.
Blessing rends asunder the darkness of the world.
Hardscrabble 