Tag: uncertainty and endurance

Friday’s Poem: Breathing the Breath of Winter

(Photo by Cynthia Guenther Richardson 2021)

The breath of winter is flung upon all

and the walk is scented with promise of frost that

may visit or transmute, warmed, into rain.

I am hoping for rain but planning for frost,

even ice, prepared for what comes.

Or I want to think so. I grew up in a land

of dense, deep snow; even birds and branches

were bitten by its ache, shaken by zero dregrees.

The beauty held me. I thought I was lucky.

Being alive was spectacular,

eyes watering, cheeks crisped, mouth puffing breaths

that floated, friendly clouds, in air that stung.

Today I am not afraid of much at all,

knowing I have lived through things like

water pipes freezing, the fire going out

so burning furniture to keep us warm,

cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner,

being thought a nuisance or failure

so later harmed and forgotten.

Suffering threaded through my passion for living.

Now I suffer with those who have shared such troubles,

and those who know danger and brilliance of snow,

the wonder of slow warmth after sheen of ice.

It is not easy learning to navigate

the wind’s vagaries.

But today I am lucky, still. I know where

I am going, to the broad river and home.

And this wind may carry a long, low moan

but it releases a ribbon of song in between–

and that is what I listen for, and that is what I hear.

Friday’s Poem on Saturday: Rumors of Beginnings

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.