rainplay
The pit-pat of rain
and little feet,
the splash of a puddle then
like liquid laughter, and
the storm is just another
plaything
to tiny toes.
artesian well
Perhaps
the hole will fill gradually,
as long-filtered rains seep down,
the weight of old winters
eroding the edges until it all runs over
into the earth.
Perhaps
it will flood in an instant,
like my heart at the sight of her, leaping
to suffuse my face with heat,
and rapid waves of hope
will be enough.
Perhaps
it will never fill.
To be empty and to know it
may be best,
for such cisterns
know true fullness when it flows.
stormcloud
Rearrange the clouds around this shadow of a hope,
that the sun will fall upon us
like the rain.
Drench our souls with truth that darker days will slip away,
like the shadow of a cloud
upon the plain.
The bitter will be swallowed as the fields lap up the storms.
We all will rise up with Him bearing fullness in our forms,
and the night will flee before us
and the peace ascend like dew
out of the pain.
still waters
Just past our door
is a little rising hill
with an oak tree and a maple
sprouting ten yards apart,
as though planted in different years
by different hands.
It inclines its chin to
the neighborly fence of the forest framing it,
against the still water of the sky.
And my daughter sees this hill
whenever she walks out our door to play.
Each passing is an imprint
of a deeper rest,
a widening assent of where she lives:
a place of hills and trees
and pond-like sky.
She has grown to love
this little hill across the way.
To her, it is the most beautiful place in all the world.
It’s only a hill.
But it is ours, and it is green,
and it is proof of home —
the simple strength of
diving roots meeting rising earth
just past our door.