The Twelve Days of Christmas

At the end of the twelfth day,
it wells up. How many more?
How many more Christmases
to wonder and carol, to wander?

To ponder keenly in this regard,
we think peculiar to late years.
Yet truly it shadows one and all,
whether many or few remain,

Christmases, that is, since his cry,
for shepherds far at night in fields,
for mother pierced to the morrow,
for young and old alike, for me.

The Winter Garden

The winter garden,
pared and cleared,
bides in time,
no mind or heart
for hour or day,
nor length of night,
just life in still,
bare-limbed,
cold-clod,
plant and soil;
when of a sudden
air to earth
wings a cardinal,
as if a hinge
of time, of summer,
memory and hope,
seeded in us,
sursum corda,
while we face
the coming snow.

The Space Between

In the confession in Morning Prayer, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we daily admit our wrongdoing and failure: "We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent." And daily I stop short between these two sentences. Will I cross the space?

A Psalm in Two Questions

Has God in mercy
spared my life
these many years?
Or, just to censure,
mercy spared,
many these years?

Improvisation

A gray catbird flutes over and under, in
and out, the green ensemble of May
in leaf, improvisation of sound and color,
such jazzy measure, as twilight rains.

Holiness and Love

I must not desire holiness; only that I may love truly.

A Voice, A Thin Silence

In the back room the washing machine gurgles and agitates. In the back yard a cardinal chirps and trills. At my desk, in the twilight before dawn, I wait for a voice, a thin silence.