While the Earth (revised)

Feeling good about yesterday's poem, "While the earth remains." Spent a lot of time with it but made few changes, except to the end. Here's another draft with a new last stanza.

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,
and then 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.

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