Heat

We are silly people,
hiding from this
Heat.

We pay hard-earned cash to
maintain synthetic igloos. Then
lose an article or two to find that light brown,
that light brown like toast, but softer.

I am not the color of toast, I am
the color of my mother.
A beautiful pink, a rosy rosy freckle.

Please, yes, open the back door.
And maybe this weather will kill
those pretty vines choking the pines.

Leviathan

It seems as though I always write in every spot but this one - email, hand-written notes, grocery lists, research papers - and so this is a neglected place of old soul thoughts.

Sometimes, though, the written word is not enough. What is inside of you must be spoken, uttered, breaking the silence with small vibrations that are absorbed by another's eardrum or disseminated into the wind. It is why we sing hymns at funerals and why Arabic women wail in mourning.

Last week I stood on the curved slope of our dead-end drive and looked up into the purple afternoon (Georgia is very beautiful in the spring) and just said, "God?" It was a moment in which I felt the rotation of the earth. I felt as if it was turning so steadily that I might be flung into space. I think that Job felt this rotation too when God answered him. God asked where he was when He made the Leviathan, when He formed the foundations of the earth.

I know that there is a life beyond this one, and when I make it there, I will understand. Until then, I will trust and live and breathe in mercy.