Love is plodding feet
Set fixedly to follow,
Whether dancing down a grassy slope
Or stumbling up steep, stony ways.
Love is vigilant sight –
Eyes ever pulled from wandering,
Whether held in helpless rapture
Or in staunch, determined gaze.
Love is chosen faithfulness,
A will renewing always,
Whether time brings tenderness
Or trouble-laden days.
Love transcends the moment
To pour out in self-surrender
That runs washing over feet
Whether feelings ebb or blaze.
A race raised in moonlight,
Eyes conformed to twilight,
Adrift through silver dimness
Convinced they clearly see.
They point to a pale moon
And praise the palisades of
Lunar beams that
Mark out every path
And all the proper ways.
But what? Now the sky turns gray,
And reds glow ‘cross their silver,
Splay a tarnish on its cleanness
To be scoured before it stains.
So grows a light that soon outshines
Their sight and all their guiding lines
‘Til blinded, they can’t see their moon
Bow white before the dazzling
Noontime Sun that walks the day.
Ground too long left dry
Grows hard and brittle,
Shrinks and breaks,
And crumbles from the cracks
To dust that trembles at a breath
And when it’s in those fragments
Sometimes true and driving rain
Can only scar:
The rushing battery
Will drive the pieces, crushed, away.
But water that, in deluge,
Might sweep over broken ground
And leave it torn,
Scraped bare, still dry,
And yet more wounded in its wake
May hover in a mist,
Fall lightly, hover – slowly see
The clods grow dark,
The cracks grow close
With healing softening.
The ebbing light pools to aqua shallows in the west,
And casts the clouds through dusty lavenders to depths of gray,
But wispy-fingered mists still reach to grasp the glow and hold it,
Lighting briefly to a burnished shine
‘Fore cooling to a softened steel
As the fire slips past and flows away.
Then the smoldering brightness draws together
Sending forth its last farewell.
The chill of depths creeps in behind it
O’er-flowing it in even’s swell.
They sweep, a-dance, a trio
Swooping wildly o’er the water,
Darting wingtips washed by wavelets
In the swerving, swirling chase.
They soar, they dive, they rise,
Gliding up above the shoreline
Showing black against a skyline
Soft with opal-gleam pastels.
They hover over color –
Pink and purple, greenish-blue
In a fragment-mix of motion
As the wavelets chase the sheen.
Then again, against the cloud-light –
Coral, blue-green, lilac-gray;
They trace a tie between the two
While weaving lace-paths with their ways.
Shimmering silken strands
Shivering, shining in a sunbeam
That slips through shaded boughs
And streams to spot the grass below –
A thousand quivering strings of glimmering
Catching, stretching out the glitterings,
Tracing rough and darkened branches
White with lacy lengths of glow –
What are these but plain and ugly things,
So many spiderwebs ‘mong branchings
Of a single, simple pine tree
That weeps sap-tears to the ground?
Yet they become much more than just themselves:
When o’re-washed with bright cascading,
Clothed a-new with light’s remaking
They’re transformed and glorified.
I traveled through a windswept waste
Wide weary, dreary-hued and beauty-bare,
When in that bitter, lonely place
A form arrested, held my stare.
It rose to just above my height –
A pole with battered board atop
That shivered in the biting wind
But bade me, even still, to stop
And gaze in hunger at its face:
Wood scarred with etchings deep and old
That spoke in silence of that place…
Drove out its harsh and empty cold.
At last I turned back to the waste
But knew now that I tread upon
A path another soul had faced
And passed. I could continue on.
New-green, the hills,
All speckle-swirled with white,
Stretch ‘round to bask
In glowing sun’s delight
And duck through woods
Of shadow tossed by trees
That tow’r aloft
To catch the laughing breeze
Which dives to whirl
Through flower-galaxies
A-drape, lace-white,
O’er swells of grass-space green
And, twirling, sets
The starlet flowers a-dance
To toss the world
Their wonder-blushing glance.
White of clouds in day-blue sky
O’er-traced with criss-crossed, branching lace,
Set wav’ring on the water’s streaming rush
To yet another place –
Sand and rocks all browned with moss
And tiny pebbles littered ‘round,
Sealed in by mirk-fogged liquid that
Slips ever past without a sound –
Oh, which to see? Could the world within
This wet, thin-layered atmosphere
Negate the glimmer-hinted realm
That far beyond its depths appears?
I see the silver tree-tops.
I watch the play of light
On leaves and branches
Lofted to the sky
Dark, dull, and dreary.
There they shine.
They glow
Against a low’ring gloom
Of clouded night.
They stand, uphold
Reflections of
A distant light.
