First light.
That's when sobbing winds could be
anything: ancestors, messengers, angels,
perhaps, as another grinding night and another
star screen, seared with mysteries that could
drive us to madness, blurs into a new life and
everything that seemed so urgent is lost somewhere
in radioactive pink and pale leaves reveling against
a city of flame and layered worlds.

Of course, God shows up, but this is not the God they
gave me; this is not the robed, fleecy, convenient, sensible
deity that stayed tucked between the covers of an heirloom
book—
between the lamp and the remote control—
the one that only came out when summoned, usually once a week,
but this one is wild and laughing and announces fine art at
every turn and appears as a fire-spun morning or even
shadows that give light its meaning.

This one is oddly human when I need that image, but
usually It's an endless, vaporous, tender awareness, less
interested in praise than in being Its creations, and when
touched by this clarity, even for a moment, I'm polished like
river stones by wonder—
almost joy, if only I could bear it,
but it's enough to turn fists into open hands,
thirst into inner rain and pain into my road back home.

The pond receives the sky like an offering,
a sacrament,
a chalice of gold.

Patricia Joan Jones