Blessed Be

Blessed Be

On a day when breathing was sweet as wild strawberries,
when air soothed my lungs like a cool drink from the spring
pouring out of the iron pipe to nurture watercress and jewelweed
rejoicing at the edge of the pond where I found a box turtle once
who I picked up and took home to live with my family for a week,
a pond ringed by cattails who filter out the toxic waste that casts a blight
on my hope that one day the child who wants to be born through me
will walk without fear of contamination by pesticides, bombs and radio
waves, at this pond where ducks nest in the tussocks, where I’ve heard
frogs sing, where once I ate the sweetest blackberry I’ve ever tasted
in October, long after the rest of the berries had dried up, been baked
in a cobbler, or plucked by a bright-eyed bird’s beak, god finally spoke to me.
I’d been expecting to find the red feather for weeks since the cardinal
flew into my heart the afternoon I asked for help to dissolve the doors
locked tight in my brain. I knew about hawks and owls, birds whose
symbology had me soaring high above the earth, or delving deep
into my shadows. The red feather didn’t say anything to me when I
asked it to speak, so I put my field guide away and rode my bike
like a horse until I could move across the surface of the earth like
I was being chased by a wall of fire, my heart a panicked rabbit
that knew it wasn’t fleet enough to escape incineration. I looked to the sky
to save me, praying for rain, but all I saw were stars, sometimes falling,
but still balls of swirling flame raining sparks that set my hair ablaze,
hissing like a den of venomous snakes, or relentless waves that wouldn’t
let time stop for a moment to breathe, charging across the universe,
a herd of horses there was no way I could break.
I surrendered before they could trample me.
When the numbness finally arrives it’s a relief after the shock
of the sting, a cold ice cube on skin that just wants the pain to go away,
forgetting that life can’t sprout from ground that’s been frozen unless the sun
arrives in spring to thaw the layers we can’t see, and that it’s possible to turn
one’s face away so far from the sun that the ice reaches bedrock,
where no seeds can sprout to feed the soul, who’s starving.
I didn’t know I had left her behind in that valley were waterfalls blossomed
after heavy rain. I thought she had walked out with me and taken her seat
on the plane that flew back across the Pacific Ocean to the desert where I
started walking toward this moment, following a trail of boulders,
then pebbles, and finally grains of sand, until they ran out and I reached
through the hourglass and took my heart in my hands, when I held my
broken self to my heart and soothed her aches as tenderly as the shadows
the boughs of a weeping willow make on the green grass embroidered with
dandelions and clover, where a rabbit nibbles in peace, letting dogs and cats and
women charge by on bikes, knowing it has nothing to fear from the oncoming storm,
what appears to be a squall of unquenchable emotion, but is really just
a wheel doing what comes naturally, guided by gentle hands who mold the rising clay
into righteous shapes, beauty revealed as each turning point is embraced.
I wept with my abandoned self and she forgave me for leaving her.
I forgave her for making me want to forget in the first place.
We dissolved into each other in waves that I now knew weren’t
relentless, but the echo of eternity giving us as many chances as
we need to reach down and pick up the red feather dropped by the
cardinal as it fed on the suet ball coated with sunflower seeds
hung by a kind-hearted woman from the branch of the pine tree
she can see from her bay window when the butterfly bush isn’t
blooming as riotously as it was today when I rode my bike to water
her garden where pink cosmos currently reign, taking their share
of the sun in full knowledge they will let their petals drop to the ground
when it’s time to release, knowing all must change, and even more,
that all should change, the seasons of the heart as explosive as
wild strawberries, the sweet flame I expected to be unbearable,
until I accepted its embrace.