A Dawn Prayer

Whose warm love flows across the land each day

Stirring Life, the world’s magic, arms yearning up,

Turning each green leaf to follow. Whose generous balm

Upon the skin is love’s touch, ahhhhhh heated fingers soothing,

Whose roar boils water from ocean to sky

Drawing sweet from salt, becoming rain, snow, river, lake;

Whose fervid beat upon us can kill us, and yet

Contemplating cold stars how we miss it, the Golden One, quotidian center

Of our days, steady companion, sower of treasures great and small:

Light-bringer, Life-quickener, dazzling, unbearably bright,

Hail, oh hail the magnificent Sun!

May Morning

With love for all of you, on this the eve of May Day…

May Morning

Fresh as the day the world was made,
This morning: dew-spattered through feather fans
Of foxtail and wild rye. Mars is low on the horizon, for once. Still
As a caught breath, the day, hushed,
Holds for a slow-golding time, the rose hints
Of bold and bright to come, of music
Yet to be made, dances old as the village, new as tomorrow’s milk.

How can it be, four billion, five hundred million years, the old
and battered Earth,
Veteran of ice and fire, meteor, petroleum, stupidity, avarice, ignorance
How can it be, this innocence: ryetops waving hello, good morning,
Beads of crystal dew filled with beauty wash,
The bright face of the Golden One coming,
Bringing suit to his blue lover again,

And Earth meeting him with an armload of flowers
As if all the grief were undone, as if
(As it is)
The sorrows and losses don’t matter, really,
Not in the face of this coming morning
When Earth says Yes
Sun says I Am Here

The great rounding of things stately in its time,
The lone bird calling to a lightening sky:
He is risen
He is risen

The Avalanche–A Poem for January

The avalanche took our home.

A wave of ice drove us before it,
And everything we thought we had we loaded on our backs
And fled, but no luck: the cold fist ground us under.
Home. Years. Love. Work. Health.
We cried as it passed over us, scraping,
Pinned in place, locked in dim blue light:
Frozen.

The avalanche took our hope.

We lay motionless, pockets collapsing about us
Stripping away more and more, and we did nothing:
Only gazed upward, and mourned, and remembered
And night came, and all disappeared
But a smear of muted stars.

And it wasn’t until the sun returned, and murky light
Bathed us in the how and where we were
A sprout insisted beneath my hand.

I got an arm free, and reached. Scraped. Swam.
And when we emerged with our poor remnants and our lives
The white expanse was dotted with green:
Life indomitable, pressing into morning light.