I am really enjoying – and being challenged by – a series of free podcasts on a range of life and spirituality topics.
If you have read this far in these postings, then you have probably already discovered the audio wisdom at www.soundstrue.com
My thanks to Tami Simon and all the wonderful voices she has collected there.
If you turn off the lights,
present in darkness,
there is a time before morning
when the cold fingers of moonlight
have released their trailing grasp
and the sky tingles with uncertainty.
A time when sky suffers
in bruised patches of grey,
discernible areas of isolated transitions.
Faint lines of bright
scratch pale in the east,
the promise of day like deep blue welts
on a passive skin that cannot move.
And yet…
the watching brings movement,
the slow suffusing broadening of blue,
awakening and orientation.
Passive sky is warmed by rising azure spread,
grey bruises healed in the passage of time
as watching builds anticipation.
Alert, the sky attentive to its toes,
the heat like icicles melting on the eastern edge,
watching for the piercings of dawn.
This waiting in questions,
this not-knowing,
a wallowing in distrust….
slowly consumed by the movement of light arising.
And the gift of this tree
outside the nurturing window
brings me to the now
in a way that touches on
both yesterday and tomorrow
its lush dancing at the end of summer
deep green with just a hint of dry,
the wind blowing a frenzy of joy
and its thusness
includes the yellow orange celebration to come
the riot of extinguishing bright light
the slow spinning into freefall
a gradual stripping away,
the purification of a branch
and blanketing of earth with brown possibility
the stark lovely grasping
brave against the dark
until soft snow
and bitter ice do their work to armour it
a brittle layer of lonely isolation
that will melt again
to juice up with tenderness
the vulnerable buds
and the soft shedding of their protective tips
will create a new unfurling
for another wave of dancing.