Live

This poem came in the wake of a hailstorm, when the earth seemed to receive both rupture and blessing at once.

I see the sunshine spill across

the day—
gold on green, promise in the air.

Clouds gather at the horizon’s hem,
mountains holding their silence—
heralds of what is to come,
witnesses. Waiting.

A hush,

then the soft applause of rain—
silver threads stitching earth to sky.

I watch the wide world receive:
meadow, field, rocky outcrop,
each patch of ground
opening or resisting
in its own secret way.

Beyond the mountains,
a bruise begins to blossom in

the sky—
deep blue, then purple,
a greenish ache spreading wide,
veined with yellow flashes
as lightning fingers the horizon.

Thunder rolls,
wind rises,
the air turns sharp as memory.

Rain hardens into hail—
white stones tumbling from heaven,
falling slow as thought,
quick as consequence.

I watch as the earth receives
or shatters:

soft soil yields,
lets the ice melt into blessing;

hard ground cracks,
echoes with the sound
of what it cannot hold.

Lightning carves its jagged script
across the sky—
veins of fire writing life into the dark,
splitting the crust of fallow ground.

Troughs bloom where energy met earth,
cradling rain like a mother holds

her child—
each channel a womb for what will grow.

Shattered soil remembers now
how to drink, how to yield,
how to let the old, dead crust
crack open into green.

Time stirs,
rushes forward—
the storm, spent,
moves on.

Warmth returns,
the sun edges out,
gentle rain falls again,
a benediction.

I walk among the aftermath—
pools in the low places,
green shoots daring through broken crust,
petals bruised but shining,
the hush after thunder
alive with birdsong.

A thought, like rain,
travels from the far fields of my mind,
seeps down, drop by drop,
through roots and stone—
filtered, refined—
until it pools quietly in my heart,
where all that has fallen
is immersed in recognition.

Within this awareness,
light and rain mingle,
a dawning from within—

and in that gentle brightness,

I hear it—carried in the flow of wind…
whispering the quiet imperative
threaded through all things:

Live,
Live,
LIVE

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This piece appears in my memoir, Seeds My Father Planted: The Garden He Cultivated in Me.

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© Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.