August 27

 

Did you notice now how the afternoon light leans

ever-so-subtly over the marigold pot, the pansy box,

interrogating the striped petunias: what time, place, circumstance

remain in the sunny stretch, the dance before the familiar

darkening frost? In the garden, corn and cosmos bend to a green,

redeeming benediction, reaching for day-blind stars,

each illumination a question disguised as a prayer.

 

Apparently there are answers poised to ambush us, and

brilliant singing somewhere deep in the quieting turning

earth, and those who remember passage from another world. All

intuition proclaims it: this lush world full of things, abundantly

designed to be let go, to be left behind, to be given away.

 

~ Lynn Rigney Schott 8/95