The Hour Upon Us

We must write today,
because that is exactly how long we have it,
if there is to be any hope of a marriage
between what is honest and alive.
There may well be much time for poems born
of memory and an earnest desire to say what was,
but we can't, any of us, be relied on to see
it right, and say it true tomorrow.
Those are the misty, fairy poems.
The hobgoblin children that get made when
wistfulness and our romantic, refractive hearts
have too much wine together after the fire
of the moment and the light from the day
have gone out, burned down to dust.
Pride often lays hands on those works too,
and we cast ourselves better, others worse,
than we ever were -- we make tiny fortresses
of small stone stanzas -- castles in far off
kingdoms where we are kissed or tortured to death,
if not both.
And I love those poems, that enchanted brood,
yes.

But there are troubles enough to truly see
the bonzai gnarled before me now,
to hold the sunrise beyond it that
lights my early perch in this chair,
to believe that God stirs around them both
and within me.
Troubles enough yes, and the shadowed
history of the world that has brought
us both here to this page doesn't need to be
weighed long to see that infinite
else could, perhaps even should, have happened.

But I am here, with the resolute bonsai blazing
in our squandered commodity of light.
And the day is begun, and will not be held back,
and things will be decided and done today,
and God, for whom nothing is wasted, is here too,
yes.

And so I make this today, or never, and it will
be here, for us to remember, at our leisure,
or in hours of great need:

There is light.
The tree stands.
Its leaves are very small.
Trunk, thick as a child's thumb.
Roots so fine and strong they testify to truths
irrefutable:
there is a God with hands.