On Behalf of Growth

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I stand with something as elusive as a shadow.

Here within the glistening grasses,

the tufts shooting up from ice-melt.

Somehow, I can believe the winter mornings,

as cold and gray as stones,

exist only to build a dais for the sunlight’s gold

as it slants in the afternoon, shimmering

like a million beads of rain in the spring

before disappearing somewhere under the earth.

Something not of dreams but of tangible mass,

like the callouses on a carpenter’s fingers,

or a sun-dusted steeple on a cathedral’s spire.

As if God, in this very moment, sows petaled life

to grow along the asphalt rims of a burned-out road,

weaving Eden back into the world’s shattered bones

with the threads of Christ’s stripes, with the remains,

tattered and hanging, from the veil torn at the folds.

And I can imagine how his love might be newborn

lilies in me, unfurling from beneath the crystals

of frost-thaws in the shadow cast by the cross.

In the grass, I stand while God melts the cold soil

and dark sheets of ice with nothing but his breath,

turning all this stone into ragged, beating flesh.