POEM: Your Mission On This First Day of Spring

(For Kate and Liam)

Your mission is to simply slog through it all.
Your mission is to rise in the morning
And rename every color that you see –
To unearth the sacred in all the food prepared by others,
Found in Mass cards and candle light vigils.

Your mission is to wring love from the dry husks of your hearts –
To plow under burnt fields and to plant –
To wait yet again for a new growing season
And tease the promise of another harvest -
So watery and so far off, enshrouded with dull light.

Your mission is to find scarred lands that require tilling
And work them hard with calloused hands
Until sweat and tears drip and commingle onto the dust.

Meanwhile –

Let the soft putty light of morning sky remind you
Just how beautiful he really was.
Let gentle April rains recall his face.
Let the cool stillness of sunset be his voice that comforts you.
Go out and mark every constellation you can see with his name
And gawk at the love that first you issued to this earth –
It fills us all with such numinous light
To break this choking grip of savage night.