While the Earth Remains

"While the earth remains, seedtime and harvesttime, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." -- Genesis 8:22 (God's promise after the flood)

Let there always be
taxol and chamomile, abnormal
pap smears and little shirts with red snaps.
Let there be fish with ginger
and green tea in the evenings.
Let there be months with nothing
but mac and cheese.
Let there be days when waking
is a heavy weight, a thickness
breathed in. Let there be weeks
together like this, weeks of sourness.
Let there be one dawn
in clean frost, the lawn cut
and smoking. Let there be ticks
in the saskatoons. The one
who picked saskatoons with me
one summer far from either of our lives
writes to say she cannot write or speak.
Let there be a lamp for her,
lasting oil, a little salt. Blessings.

Equinox today, the fall is coming.
Juniper dusty blue with berry, sumac
blushing. The tattered cherry
blooms again, a few bright blossoms.
Is that hope or hopelessness? The fruit
will never set. The flocks grow restless.
On this day the year is hinged like a door
with no closing. Let there always be
the gates of morning, the gates of evening.
Wheels. All creatures walking.

Let every thing take its right name:
rice and paper, salt and beans. Let dust
remember skin or desert, let dust
film everything. Oh Lord, what comes
between us? Dust and thirst,
a lack of patience. Shyness.
There's skin at least, and a secret
I don't know I'm keeping. What name
does it have? Shame. Eden.

Let all the graves have names.
Let there be spareness, winter
with just one hawk, and no hiding.
Let there be Junes jampacked, choc-a-bloc, thick
as berries. Let us pray indifferently
in whispers, let us pray and be blasted
open. Let there be chili and coffee,
salty, sour, sweet and bitter, desperate
and dappled, morning and evening,
while the earth remains.