from the abundance

BY JANE KENYON

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. ...

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....

When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me....

I am food on the prisoner's plate. ...

I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills...

I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden...

I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge....

I am the heart contracted by joy. ... the longest hair, white before the rest....

I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. ...

I am the musk rose opening

unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. ...

I am the one whose love

The hand of our golden hour strikes as we find our way home; wrapped in the familiar ache of that yellow-warm embrace,

Like the soft bruises that make you laugh.

The longing of grief is to return to moments like these, when the smiling light held us while we held each other.

The tender sweetness of loss is having held this light together, until even the brightest memories darken against new horizons.

And the hope of even these words will fail, when, daughter, your richest hours will not be ours.

BY JOHN DONNE

By Kathleen Jamie

It was winter, near freezing, I’d walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song.

by Lisel Mueller

It lies in our hands in crystals 

too intricate to decipher 

It goes into the skillet 

without being given a second thought 

It spills on the floor so fine 

we step all over it 

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball 

It breaks out on our foreheads 

We store it inside our bodies 

in secret wineskins 

At supper, we pass it around the table 

Tell me, when did our bodies forget how to dance? How to move and how to play and take wild chances like our children do in their bodies? Like the hills rising up to meet them? Like the air breathing life in their lungs?

Lungs like gulping largemouth bass drinking in the rivers. Rivers like living waters moving through the world— falling down and baptizing us from the sky. Sky like sprawling blue mountains— laying across the horizons like bodies.

Bodies we have forgotten how to use: to be caught up in rhythms, to be alive in the work, to be bent over the land— plucking heirlooms up from the earth to feed our singing mouths.