Two Poems
Consider the Lilies
i.
Between the regions of anticipation and
participation the heart keeps vigil for what
all hearts wait for:
justice to take form,
the return of the beloved,
experience to meet language,
for reconciliation we do not yet have
words for, a modicum of wholeness,
like the consonant tone of a circle closing.
And from these flushed desires
flood the rivers and psalms of how long?
ii.
Below the seal of snow, the glacier lily
remembers itself, the sway of a head-heavy choir.
In the reverberant belly of the earth, the bulb
hums what green has always meant.
Come spring, its imagination is ripe,
which is to say, it bears in its body
the unabridged distance between what is
and what could be.
Does this audacious feat not command our attention?
Among the deep drifts of ambiguity, yet lily hopes.
iii.
This is a formidable beauty:
Emergence is not necessarily whole and all at once.
Living things arrive by accumulated growth
in the warp and weft of light.
Be kind with all that is nonlinear, most especially
the sacred verbs: to heal, to awaken,
to know, to love, to become.
Our waiting is not a singularity. Can you sense it?
It has happened, will happen, is happening.
Genesis in the Anthropocene
A poem in elimination
The earth was
the let there be,
the light
and the darkness.
Let be
the dome sky.
Let be the land
and the waters,
that gathered good.
Let every kind tree
bear the seed in it.
Let signs give
greater light.
Let swarms.
Let fish wild.
Let birds fly. Let the earth
ground every good.
And God said, See
the face of all the earth,
everything that has the breath of life,
every green good multitude
hallowed in creation.
In the beginning,
the whole face of the ground
breathed,
became a living being,
every tree the tree of life.
A river flows.
Keep it free,
for man caused a deep sleep
made bones cling
naked and ashamed.
