Welcome Judith Sornberger, guest blogger, and author of Open Heart, Wal-Mart Orchid, Practicing the World, and The Accidental Pilgrim: Finding God and His Mother in Tuscany.
Below is one of several poems from a series called “Days of Ash and Wonder”—poems written during this Lenten season. Some are more personal than others, but, as with all so-called “personal” or “confessional” poems, the hope is that they will speak to others, nonetheless.
Small Windows
from the exhibit “52 Weeks” at the Gmeiner Arts and Cultural Center: 52 paintings by H.
M. Levan—each 12” by 12”, one for each week of the year.
There is no point, my grown son says
when I call, then hangs up. What can I say?
Some days I’m tempted to agree.
Today, though, I listen
at small windows of shape and color.
What’s the point? I ask the light-infused mist
spilling through daybreak onto white buds
opening as if they have a mission,
the apple tree near the end of her season,
most of her fruit gone to deer and ruin,
the late spring field of snow, lavender-blue
in the day’s last light,
when in only days it will vanish.
What’s the point of the particular pinfeathers
of the titmouse on her snowy branch,
of loving this bird whose outsized eye
I imagine as the center
of some universe I cannot enter?
What’s the point of the indigo
planet of the blueberry,
of hemlock roots reaching through
solid earth to nurture one another?
What’s the point? I ask the pines
at sunset, lined up like monks at Compline,
the point of splitting all this wood
to get through one more winter.
What’s the point of the white clapboard house
trimmed in evergreen where we try
to learn to love each other?
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