April 8, 2012

The birds are having their own sunrise service this morning.  I haven't heard so many birds so early in a long time, mockingbirds, blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, and crows all making a joyful noise, loud and joyful!  It started with the one mockingbird, and ended with the crows making so much noise the others moved on to other yards.  Now, it's quiet, the blush of sunrise appears through the trees, slowly rose and lavendar are showing up, chalk gray, the deepest blue washing out to something softer and more distant.  Trees silhouette against all those colors, as daylight enters they will begin to take on form and the leaves will be more than black lace against the sky.  The lone mockingbird is back making his long song of other birds.

Now that this sky has taken up clouds of fire at the horizon pushing them into the pale blue overhead, making a glorious riot of colors slowly spreading and fading, I am thinking of what resurrection means, why we celebrate it, why in the spring when from the blankness of winter, leafless trees, the world wakes again to longer days and a more crowded life, green again in its silent explosion bringing back birds from their winter homes to make all this joyful noise, people out walking early in the soft cool morning.  It seems in the spring it's easier to have . . .

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
   
 Lisel Mueller

It's in this day, where miracles seem possible, where what we know of God makes us believe in them, where the black dog out running through the yard is wagging his tail and sniffing for every interesting smell.  Everything seems to be so full of hope it cannot be contained but must, over and over, make all this new green, all these white blossoms, white cane exploding from the dark earth.  What else is this about but the hope of continuing?  At the end of short dark days, warmth and more sunlight, more of everything we love, so much that we feel our hearts thawing as well, swelling and remembering gratitude, for all these blessings.

Happy Easter!