I have sent my faith to pasture
In fields of feathered snow.
I have fed my longing dawn lights
Of tomorrows yet to come.
But my hope in humble prayer
Bends with the setting sun,
Too steeply the day is falling,
So thirsty the night has become.
My mornings are crippled by your absence,
Even the sun drags her light across the sky
Lining the emptiness of those silhouettes
That survived your life.
My longing is of a soft dawn
Rubbing its possibilities in my face
And brightening my countenance
With pale yellow light,
Until I reach that place where thoughts
Become trees reaching
For their potential.
In the night, everything seems
To widen out, to allure the light.
The borders of sky blurring intently,
Erasing the path on to which
My longing walks
On sore feet through farmlands of stars.
Alone like a pilgrim walking towards
The unknown.
A tender seasonal gust of leaves
Scoops my dreams up
And rush them through the ajar window.
A fine-toothed comb
Brushes through my knotted thoughts.
It is as though the morning is left
Sitting, half asleep, out there
On one of the distant isles with nothing
But a lighthouse to keep it
From leaning back into the darkness
Of the pre-autumnal night.
This is the heart of melancholy;
A wistful longing, a vague memory of safe harbor,
Scraped away by the rawness of beautiful sunny days.
A dream with one leg rooted in summer pasture
And one leg winged by the mystery of night.
Tonight, the rivers
Have frozen over
And bright summer days
Can’t even seem to bring us
Back together.
We sleep under the same
Black sky, but the stars
Seem to create different patterns
In our lives. Perhaps it is time
To let our memories draw
Shadows in the snow and simply wait
For the sun to rise.
Do not offer me the ocean
When I am thirsty,
Like the sleeping flowers
In winter
I am nourished by longing,
By the glimpse of chasing lights
Across a pitch black sky.
Show me only a bird
When I want to fly,
And I will spend my life
Growing wings.
You gave me all your days,
They came and went
With rocks and weeds,
Brambles and blossoms.
Now I give you all my tomorrows,
Softly above haze,
Or thorny in graceful loneliness,
With gales and hush,
Hale and summers,
They are all yours.
Of all the gifts of grace
Nothing is as precious as longing.
We see it in the meeting
of sky and hoarfrost:
A white-haired aerial world
Fighting the elaborate rules of time.
Or in the quiet of the night sea
Without a single light to reflect.
We see it in the singing hazels
Bleeding into sleeping clouds,
And in the waning sun’s burgundy
Burning the past in its hand.
But most of all we see it in people,
Walking side by side,
Young and growing, old and leaning,
Always haloed by the dream of tomorrow.
It was in the absence
Of something
The questions arrived,
And life
twisted and turned
To shove the horizon
A bit further.
