This Material World: A Benediction
World-mothering air, air wild, /… fast fold thy child.
GM Hopkins
Morning’s heron drifts
low over the sycamore.
A solitary, saurian flap
astonishes the cedar-tops.
Far past seeing,
through the gun-metal dawn,
a thousand cranes
in weary squadrons
bellow joy.
Out in this air a wildness cries out only to itself, lives only
once to hear its whispered voice alive among the swaying trees.
A wildness cries in every air where only silence ought to be.
Here a tiny voice disturbs the quiet space where each one lives alone,
where each thing dries its leaves in the trailing fragrance of the rain,
in the dispossessions that engender and expose each stark enfolded self,
in the cry that draws us one and all and time and time again into this
mordant, murderous world’s life-mothering atmosphere, as far
from spirit as things get, as far from things unseen as those dark
quantities themselves: the compromising body, the uncompromising
body of evidence that rises to our life-denying eye, into our joyous
pulsing heart, into all we struggle not to see. So if it please, o world,
do grant us each and every day our dread day’s daily crumb,
and deliver us each moment from the life of worlds to come,
for here, from somewhere far past seeing,
you can hear the wild clamor
of your interrupted solitude.
Listen as, within your precious
silence, above the pearly dawn,
a thousand cranes in weary squadrons
make joyful noise.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution (https://www.revuerevolution.com/en/db-jonas) and others.
Amethyst Review 