“A Blessing”
I am sharing a spring poem in the middle of winter, in the darkest days even, because I’m pretty sure dark days are also a blessing. I’ll save you the cliches. Last night I imagined the often-imagined timeline of a man’s life - the baby crawling, the boy, the adult walking and the elder, hunched over with a cane. Then I imagined him spinning. Instead of his linear path, he pirouetted through each of his days. His whole life became a waltz. This poem is a waltz, a meadow that exists here and then gone and then again. At some point the ponies were sheltered in a barn, the grasses and trees covered in snow. This is Minnesota, after all. But then I read the poem and it is spring, there are ponies again. One day I will read it on a day that isn’t dark and life will feel congruous. At this point in the timeline of man, the ponies are gone, surely, but maybe there is something else there, just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota. Maybe the willows are still in the pasture, maybe the remnants of a rotten barbed wire fence. Or maybe there is something generational, something underground and burrowing, something waiting for its chance in the cycle to break into blossom once more.
Read the poem here.