A Few Poems
Blooming
A calla lily opens
outside my window
while I write,
doing its quiet work
while I do mine.
The Harvesters
No one hurries at this harvest: laborers
lunch and sprawl and dawdle in the sparse
shade. A few continue cutting and binding,
their strokes slowed by the noonday sun.
Beyond the walls of ripe wheat that stop
the eye, far fields lie peaceful; the land
stretches its fingers to the sea.
They who work the land don’t see
landscape. They know only the wide
wedge of wheat, the heat, the taste
of gruel, the ringing angelus, the bird’s caw,
the lunchtime talk that ripples like wind
over ripened grain, the child’s unalarming cry,
the palpable calm of knowing what to do,
and when (in due time), and for whom.
Root and Blossom
for Kristen and Jordan
Curtis Hollow Farm, August 8, 2009
Two trees on a hillside
where living and dying
have taken their turns,
bringing forth fruit in due season,
send their roots deep, tentative,
then sure, of the home they have found
in this hospitable soil.
They stay where they are planted.
Blossoms appear, then crabapples.
Rely on them. Where humans erupt
and go their errant ways, they remain,
called to fidelities we cannot fathom.
Remember them. In the long hours
you spend where few trees grow,
in the night when your thoughts bring
you back to this ancient ground.
Come again to lie in their shade.
Consider how they receive the light
they’re given. They reach. They blossom.
The world for which you have been so carefully prepared
is being taken away from you
by the grace of God.
– Bruggeman –
Birth keeps happening.
Small empty hands curl
around our hopes and hold
us captive. A child’s needs
are gifts. We learn again what
can be taught only from the cradle—
pure pleasure in the body’s
many miracles, full-bellied
laughter over falling things.
Small spaces in the heart open
wider as we linger, putting off
what seemed to matter more.
Death keeps happening, too:
Fires burn a path through
tended gardens and offices
where good stewards sat at work,
unaware that every page would feed
an hour’s ravenous flames.
A young man’s body is wracked
with disease. Another’s, crushed
between metal and slick road.
Fierce as the love that lets us
live to see such loss is the hunger
for life it leaves behind.
Before the backward glance
a new landscape stretches, newly
familiar. That was then—
now is a place of decisions
we do not need to make in fear
or haste. What we know
is sufficient for the day. We
speak the words at hand, water
the plants and watch
for small birds in the sycamore tree.
Grace keeps happening. Old friends
invite us, and new ones. We listen
for summonings, subtler now
than when every morning’s alarm
set us on a known path.
The call of the moment takes us by surprise.
Every assent resets our course:
Begin now. And now. Begin again.
