We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

Spring

Faith
is the instructor.
We need no other.

Guess what I am,
he says in his
incomparably lovely

young-man voice.
Because I love the world
I think of grass,

I think of leaves
and the bold sun,
I think of the rushes

in the black marshes
just coming back
from under the pure white

and now finally melting
stubs of snow.
Whatever we know or don’t know

leads us to say:
Teacher, what do you mean?
But faith is still there, and silent.

Then he who owns
the incomparable voice
suddenly flows upward

and out of the room
and I follow,
obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking
the Lord was once young
and will never in fact be old.

And who else could this be, who goes off
down the green path,
carrying his sandals, and singing?

The Poet Always Carries a Notebook

What is he scribbling on the page?
Is there snow in it, or fire?

Is it the beginning of a poem?
Is it a love note?

More Honey Locust

Any day now
the branches
of the honey locust
will be filled
with white fountains;
in my hands
I will see
the holy seeds
and a sweetness
will rise up
from those petal-bundles
so heavy
I must close my eyes
to take it in,
to bear
such generosity.
I hope that you too
know the honey locust,
the fragrance
of those fountains;
and I hope that you too will pause
to admire the slender trunk,
the leaves, the holy seeds,
the ground they grow from
year after year
with striving and patience;
and I hope that you too
will say a word of thanks
for such creation
out of the wholesome earth,
which would be, and dearly is it needed,
a prayer for all of us.

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
    and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
    almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
        and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
    is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

It Was Early

It was early,
    which has always been my hour
        to begin looking
            at the world

and of course,
    even in the darkness,
        to begin
            listening into it,

especially
    under the pines
        where the owl lives
            and sometimes calls out

as I walk by,
    as he did
        on this morning.
            So many gifts!

What do they mean?
    In the marshes
        where the pink light
            was just arriving

the mink
    with his bristle tail
        was stalking
            the soft-eared mice,

and in the pines
    the cones were heavy,
        each one
            ordained to open.

Sometimes I need
    only to stand
        wherever I am
            to be blessed.