Pause for Poetry

"There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom."

~Li-Young Lee, "From Blossoms"

I read this lovely poem this morning, and thought this stanza especially apt right now -- both during the heady, blossoming days of spring, and just for the juicy kernel of truth at the heart of these lines. We do all have days, I think, even in the midst of hardship, suffering, heartache, where we forget for a moment the hold that death has on our world, and we enter into interludes of joy that are so tangible and real that they cause heartache of another kind ("What a beautiful piece of heartache/this has all turned out to be" to quote Over the Rhine). I think it's in those moments of moving from "joy to joy," "wing to wing," and "blossom to...sweet impossible blossom" that we live in a heightened knowledge of the reality that death and decay do NOT, praise God, have the final world in our lives and in the created world. Perhaps it is when we are most attuned to the in-breaking Kingdom that the world becomes lit up with a kind of holy light that enables us to see and rejoice rightly, whatever our outward circumstances.

At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)