Early February
This is a sad, grey time--
pleasure here and there, but little
that deepens into joy--
not even grief that drives the soul
to utter its de profundis
and so be widened into prayer.
Only the feeling of nothing to rise to:
neutered moments of waiting, wanting
something, not knowing what.
Laundry to be done and breakfast
cleared away.
Grace doesn't always come as a rainbow.
Sometimes it hovers like a pewter sky
tucked in around the treetops,
bringing the landscape close to the eye.
Still, grace comes on a day like this
in odd disguises:
traction on my boots,
the man chipping ice off the library steps,
fat truck tracks to drive in--
and all the shades of grey.
For the gifts of greyness let us give thanks:
cobblestones and flagstones and boulders of granite,
clapboard houses, dark-shuttered and lamplit in the afternoon,
snow on asphalt, pencil and charcoal,
the naked stretch of steel that protects us
at the bridge's edge,
old movies from a kinder time,
the wolf and the owl—hungry and hidden—
the rabbit's fur,
the hawk's eye,
the dolphin's back,
the cocoon where a caterpillar
quietly works out
its salvation.
This is a sad, grey time--
pleasure here and there, but little
that deepens into joy--
not even grief that drives the soul
to utter its de profundis
and so be widened into prayer.
Only the feeling of nothing to rise to:
neutered moments of waiting, wanting
something, not knowing what.
Laundry to be done and breakfast
cleared away.
Grace doesn't always come as a rainbow.
Sometimes it hovers like a pewter sky
tucked in around the treetops,
bringing the landscape close to the eye.
Still, grace comes on a day like this
in odd disguises:
traction on my boots,
the man chipping ice off the library steps,
fat truck tracks to drive in--
and all the shades of grey.
For the gifts of greyness let us give thanks:
cobblestones and flagstones and boulders of granite,
clapboard houses, dark-shuttered and lamplit in the afternoon,
snow on asphalt, pencil and charcoal,
the naked stretch of steel that protects us
at the bridge's edge,
old movies from a kinder time,
the wolf and the owl—hungry and hidden—
the rabbit's fur,
the hawk's eye,
the dolphin's back,
the cocoon where a caterpillar
quietly works out
its salvation.