There was going to be a poem about the little birds,
but that didn’t happen.  Of course, all the poems come back,
at some point, to the little birds, so there’s that.
And then I would have been writing about shame,
or rather, I did write about shame.  For days.
But then I never took it past the messy draft,
and so this big space opened up and then the bit about grief
started to rise like dough in the back of the oven
near the pilot light.  But I’m sort of an amateur myself
when it comes to grief.  And I don’t want experience–
please, Universe, keep me naive on that score–
but I want to know how to hold it, because it’s always there
in the soup we swim in, always edging up to someone,
somewhere.  And I want to know how to hold it,
because it is part of the essential story, yours,
and someone else’s, too.  Not just Mary watching her son
die up there on that hill.  It is, well, part of the soup.
And then there are, of course, the little birds,
and the way they hover over the flowers at sunset
or dart through the brush, whisper-like and timid.
The way shadows grow over the fields in the afternoon
and the breezes begin to settle into the hollow.

Gratitude List:
1.  Friends who, intentionally or inadvertently, light a fire under me when I need it most.
2.  Considering the semantic shading of gratefulness and gratitude.
3.  Vermilion
4.  The wild excitement of coming down the home stretch on a long-term project.
5.  Re-fashioning, re-crafting, re-purposing, re-making, and not just in the realm of the physical, you know?

May we walk in Beauty!