The rumor is that the year changes.

Still, I breathe with my heart, earthen and
cosmic oxygen rising from conduits
hewn of shadow, light, water.
If it is a new entrance before us, also an exodus
that carries us to beginnings. A labyrinth, a journey
with pilgrims come round from afar. You and I.

I say, remand our treasures to the fire
of life, of loss. Plant random bits in good places
where springs quench deeper thirst.
Move among trees and mossy rocks, hollow and peak,
greet sea’s leviathans, guardians of earth, winged messengers.
We can recall such language; God recalls our names.
See, evening is seeded with starlight and the heavens
shed grace: mercy and knowledge given with no falsity.

I hope for a miracle of start overs. Righteous indignations and
angers loosed to be upended, disbanded.

For the poverty of fear and shame with their
failed assumptions, viperous words to be relinquished.

For the superfluous to fall away so ears hear
and eyes see each moment now with the best expectancy.

And fissures and fractures that divert us from
transformation to be healed, and lives that strain
from pressures of the world to be reinforced.

I call for a shepherding of our errant stories,
each one born of blood and bone, erupting with
a capacity for love: let us carry them to country and town.
And reimagine shards of beauty, breakage of sorrows
to remake and brace our living, a creation amid the harrowing.

This labyrinth of prayer is a minor strand of our tapestry.
We hail from a fathomless universe, crisscross earth
in designs of tender bodies. This is what is given us.
We are not ever quite lost as imagined. Nor alone in our cocoons of flesh.

A new time, the talk goes. A chance for reclamation, reaffirmation.

I give it credence, my face tilted to sky, then street.

May we grant favor to one another,
and hoist compassion, a torch from dawn to dark.
Greet peace upon entering and leaving each door, feet
casting off the chains of futility.

Here, my hands, joining the common circle.