The Harvest

How strange to observe
what our final harvest yields
and what falls away; to notice
what treasures the winnowing spares
and lifts for a lifetime’s revision:
not tension, but its release,
not sorrow, but its relief;
reviewing the flickering epiphanies
when we were seen
and known in our fullness;
revisiting the creation we enfleshed
with our singular energy,
lit with our tiny light and waning time,
and yet there it spins, shining in the world.

Here is our bushel of realized produce: we loved,
and were loved; made of ourselves an offering
that spread and grew ever wilder, closer to true;
remained always grateful for given and chosen kin, teachers,
those who eased a hard day’s passage with green wishes for our peace.

I think they all came true.

That night the music opened doors we’d closed
or had missed in the foolish speed of life lived too small;
the wonders that came of curses; the endless garden
growing from discarded seeds; the surprises born of loss;
the willingness to seek and grant mercy, to thread gratitude
through suffering, to discover, recover, uncover, to see.

Maybe our wisest instinct
was to keep turning, looking beyond, revisiting chances
with wider hospitality, reducing caution to nothing
but welcome; tenderly sheltering questions,
renouncing our inheritance of ancient fences planted
to confine the fertility of our joy–
all the old voices we silenced forever;
we were never what they wanted us to be,
those shoulds that inhibited flowering, incarcerating gift.

And how we rose, primal and pure in the pollinating songs
of possibility, the choices we set to our own chorus
of yes and now. And still we turn,
and still the wounding walls fall and the waiting fields widen,
and we become the soil that bears our being, imprinted forever.

Harvest is the cutting back to essence, seeing
and then seeing again, deeper and below,
a readiness for death, knowing its womb gestates life.
It is all mystery and then there is finally none,
but the need to reach, connect, and grow,
to answer calls planted solely in our love-fashioned cells,
to hold each breath as gift
and set it free, like this, this time of harvest,
this moment of autumn skies sighing with geese
crying farewell in language that knows us by name.

Here’s a link to an interview I did for our local PBS station, Channels 10/36, WMVS, in Milwaukee. It will air on Portia Young’s wonderful program, 10thirtysix, on Thursday, August 18, at 7:30 P.M. https://youtu.be/QJT-IXKx1oQ

And, I’m so very happy to share the news that Zeltner Publishing, an Israeli publishing company, will be publishing The Rare, Tiny Flower in both Arabic and Hebrew. This is truly joyful news.

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