My world shrinks with age.

Too much time pruning
what is left of my life
like a bonsai tree
until it is a
tame and demure
little thing.

Can the real self ignore the
howls outside our door?

Can we love the world
into submission,
dream it
into peace?

Nothing to see here,
just dainty,
skulking branches,
never reaching for things they
know nothing about.

Every day a trap door opens up
and some of us plunge into another
shrieking surprise.

Others dance on the shores
of the lava.

I want my miniature,
well-trained
world back.

But I know too much.

The sky shifts,
braids moonglow
into clouds
and hides the starfields
that time moved on from.
Still I believe,
even while dwindling in
a cage of riddles . . .

I still believe someday
it will all open
up and pour,
in one crazed chorus,
through the
crumbling dream,

and I will be surrounded
by answers
to yesterday's questions
in a place beyond
form and separation
and pretending,

in a place where everything
beautiful lasts,

where everything perfect
never truly died
because,
I will realize,

I never left God.

Patricia Joan Jones