New Hymnal

I wanted to have the life some of you apparently have
where you are thoroughly in love with the purple throats
of the irises in your yards and ever-tumbling with joy
over the individual reds of the house finches on your feeders

where you dive headfirst into the language of awe
when perched atop a local cliff and sit enthralled
by the fungi you spotted in your neighbor’s yard
wondering if they’d kill you but oh so lovely how could they

If this is how you are I honor your optimism
over the need for beauty and love
in our battle for the lives
we all think we all should live

When it comes to awe I take mine
from the voices of those in pain
who yet struggle to be healed and I say
in the clatter of a world falling apart there is yet

a sacred sound that to me is equal to the slap
of humpback waves on the side of your boat
In the color of poster board rage and flags in revolt
I can see the depth of how staggeringly handsome

humanity can be in the teeth of the gale of repression
and while repression itself has no beauty to it
the response it engenders in those driven against it
for me comes close to the catch in your breath

from the sight of fields of wild lavender
the scent of the earth warming in spring
the petrichor that predicts the end of a drought
that feels to me like the moment the barricades fall

When time comes to me to take in your notion of beauty
I shall take it in as a due reward for pushing through
but until then I will have to hone my grim adoration
for the grim into an edge that will carve down walls

and if you choose to extoll your esthetic as superior
I will turn and hope for the best for you in what is coming
and continue to seek and hope to find a new hymnal
in this moment where the old one has begun to falter