POEM: For All My Children

Before it becomes the music of our  world,
Your names have a story. Before there were words,
Before circles around fires sent stories skyward.
Before retelling, and dancing,
Before prayer.

You are a green-eyed geranium wish,
A blue-eyed ocean of life,
The wrap-around flavor of brown-eyed coffee,
a vermillion way of seeing the world,
like simmering beets bubbling in chopped
onion, tomato and cumin stew.

We could not have dreamed you,  you who
arrive to us still water, mysteries
in the jeans’ pocket of a universe
waiting to be fished out with the keys
and the loose change of growing older.

And just as before the sun rises,
this winter gray lightens just enough to suggest
we’ve not been abandoned,
we’ve not died in our sleep,

You are the sign reminding us what the
angels in their Halleluiah glory look like.

and when the sun reclines
Pulling its gentle curtain across brown fields,
we imagine, as parents do, all
the fearful things.