For all that I hold which is precious

My mother’s hand: 

Weather-worn, small,

Folded in mine, ridged,

Sculpted by moment, and love.

My second baby:

Cupped captive in the womb, 

Kept safe, mysterious, hiccups,

Enveloped expectations.

My beloved:

Woven and wonderful relief 

with the pain of belonging

To each and every tide together.

The chin of my dog:

Gray and toothy, pleading,

almond-eyed trust I cannot 

Imagine departing in so short a time.

A raspberry:

Plucked plump and filled

With light and love, sunny seeds

That help a sweet-sour life to grow.  

The perpetual heart:

Pinned to all things yet

Fleeting as all hearts are,

viscera-bound to beat the everlasting.

My heart.

 

March.

Poem: A Lens

-Malcolm Guite

That All, which always is all everywhere
—Donne

Not that we think he is confined to us,
Locked in the box of our religious rites,
Or curtained by these frail cathedral walls,
No church is broad or creed compendious
Enough. All thought’s a narrowing of sites.
Before him every definition fails,
Words fall and flutter into emptiness,
Like motes of dust within his spaciousness.

Not that we summon him, but that he lends
The very means whereby he might be known,
Till this opacity of stone on stone,
This trace of light and music on the air,
This sacred space itself becomes a lens
To sense his presence who is everywhere.

Mary Oliver died yesterday.

THE SWAN
by Mary Oliver
Issue no. 124 (Fall 1992)

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music—like rain pelting the trees—like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross
streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings
like the stretched light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? 
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? 
And have you changed your life?

Hosea.

"Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I who took them up in my arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them." - Hosea 11: 3-4