Verses for the Old Year

I.

Christmas morning
I counted birds through the dusty
Sliding glass door. These were the birds:

A mob of kinglets
Fluttering like grey butterflies 
Around the suet cake.

Flickers, a pair creeping 
Along the top of the wall.

Scrub jay clinging to the ruins
Of a sunflower to drink
From the saucer I’d filled
With tap water,
This dry winter overflowing 
Only with sunshine.

Colors muted, observe,
Even the pair of bluebirds
Coming to the ash tree each
Morning, dusty, far above me,
Just there, but beyond my knowing.
Fed, as I am, by the hand of God.


II.

That all my days in this mortal husk
Are but seed and sign of what is to come.
Not disembodied, corporeal,
Grown here in this mundane soil
As the grain of wheat makes the bread
The acorn, the oak.

Dropped stone in time’s silent pool
The mock-orange twig turning 
River’s white torrent, distant migrations, 
Inevitable returns, gradual revenants.
Our ending distant and dim, 
As our beginning, but foreseen.

Our prayers rise like incense
We watch for the morning
And know that the harvest
Will be slow, and incremental
As the seed reaching for the light.
Last season’s farewell-to-spring
Bringing firewheels of disappeared summers,
Prophecies of the garden that will come.