This isn’t a poem. 

It is a moment that wants 

to be set free,  a small

thing with a bigger imagination, 

a plaintive whistling in the dark, 

a boy with a bird on his shoulder, 

a shadowed heart that also blazes. 

This is a pause in lavender twilight, 

a thought that strikes dew-laden air,

a random stop on a serpentine trail that 

detains us so we may become less lost. 

This is a minor rescue despite the rending. 

It is a moment of intimacy saved for  

others frail or frightened or 

hungry for something else. 

Here arrives night, dreams or not,

still an old woolen blanket 

so that inside it we may camp, 

carried by night dense with falling stars,

warming our hands over pulses of

heat from stubs of saved candles. 

This is a memorial, yes, but a story

of miracles. The morning comes like a scarf

drifting over the face. It has always a 

luminosity that wants not to let us go, 

our human hopes close like protection, 

with recognition discerned in kindness, 

and soon everyone more known

to one another in the struggle. 

Angels, that’s what seems closer now, 

the angels summoned of our longing

or our surrendering,

each drifting this way, a chorus. 

To hold up.

To comfort.

To forge a way to new horizons.

So if this is no poem, 

then consider it a memo, 

a reminder, 

a way of remembering 

all that is good about the world, 

the things we must not misplace, 

and promises made to keep: 

find hallowed the life we each can mold 

now, not then nor far tomorrow,

and also release it, exuberant or weary,

with the wings and winds of God

to the hands that will open.