There’s a golden light that shines just so,
round the not-yet-ripe apples on the tree
when the day glows warm in her dying hour.
It wraps quietly round the skins
for just a few minutes like a tender hand cupping a chin
before it slips slowly away to follow
the sparrow’s flight home
leaving room for the soft purples of twilight.
This is the way of creation.
The way the old caresses the new.
The way the dying stand usher to the living.
The echoes of the earth beg us to ponder
the inconceivable beauty of life.
To really look it over in our hands.
Breathe it into the nefesh of our skin.
To pluck it like a warm piece of fruit
and let the juice run sweet down our chins.
To consider that as one person reaches the end,
yet another is just beginning.
The first edges toward the abyss
carrying behind him all the deep pangs of a life worn in.
All the sorrows, the aches and pains,
the adventures and longings,
the lessons and prayers spoken into the night.
Both weary from the rugged years of pressing on
and strong from seasons of laudable memories
pressed like old flowers in time.
And yet, as he takes the arm of life’s farewell,
there is another who comes forth with full cry,
embracing the bright white.
Fresh and innocent, with eyes that still glimpse God in passing.
This new life pushed into the cold with nothing behind him,
only days and days spread out like fields yet to be tilled.
A clean slate to be written, like the poet’s fresh sheet.
He who sees naught yet but his mother’s face,
who startles at the wind through the maple leaves
and grasps at life with full fist.
Isn’t this the miraculous?
That just as one draws his last breath, another gulps his first.
That as one goes out perhaps he grazes the other going in.
That the cycle repeats in endless hope.
A chord always singing.
A choir in endless refrain.