The Sun

I want to walk through life amazed and inarticulate with thanks

Photo: © Bodi Hallett

The Sun

This morning on the desk,
facing up,
a poem of Kavanagh’s
celebrating a lost love.

“She was the sun,” he said,
and now she still
lives in the fibre
of his arms,
her warmth
through all the years
folding the old man’s hand
in hers
of a Sunday
Dublin morning.

Sometimes reading
Kavanagh I look out
at everything
growing so wild
and faithfully beneath
the sky
and wonder
why we are the one
terrible
part of creation
privileged
to refuse our flowering.

I know
in the text of the heart
the flower is our death
and the first opening
of the new life
we have yet to imagine,
but Kavanagh’s line
reminds me
how I want to know
that sun,
and how I want to flower
and how I want to claim
my happiness
and how I want to walk
through life
amazed and inarticulate
with thanks.

And how I want to
know that warmth
through
love itself,
and
through the sun itself.

I want to know
that sun
of happiness
when I wake
and see through
my window
the morning color
on the far mountain.

I want to know
when I lean down to the lilies
by the water
and feel their small and
perfect reflection
on my face.

I want to know
that gift
when I walk
innocent through the trees
burning with life
and the green
passion
of the pasture’s
first growth,

and I want to know
as lazily
as the cows
that tear at the grass
with their
soft mouths.

I want to know
what I am
and what I am
involved with by loving
this world
as I do.

And I want time
to think of all
the unlived lives:

those that fail to notice
until it is too late,

those with eyes staring
with bitterness,

and those
met on the deathbed
whose mouths are wide
with
unspoken love.

Every year
they keep me faithful
and help me
realize there is more
to lose
than I thought
and more at stake
than the mere
possibility
of a recognized
heroism.

They remind me
why
I want to be found by love,
why I want to come alive
in the holiness
of that belonging,
and like Kavanagh

I want to be courageous
in my terrors.

I want to know
in life or death
all the ways
the warmth of that
great rose fire
sun
in its heaven
has made me.

And everything
that made me
has been
a sun to my growing,
that is the article
of my faith,
even the darkness
of that soil that went
before the time of light
was another
kind of sun.

What I am
is what I have
been grown by,
the sun,
that great love,
all the many small loves
and that one love too
who waited so long
to find me and
who has always
walked by my side
folding my
remembering
hand in hers.


-from The House of Belonging

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