God’s Sunlight

Beauty has a way of sinking into
everything we do like a time-lapse
photograph of dark flowers blossoming out of
everything

White horses on a hillside in the rain
couldn’t be more beautiful
and the silvery rain itself whose lateral beads
the wind jangles

Our oceans are as wide as the five oceans themselves
as they lick the continents’ edges over and
over each millennium and yet
the land transpires

And then there’s sky with its galactic
twinklings in a kind of cotton fuzz of
light embedding them in deep space

Our eyes could be trained to see only the
beauty that there is when we see through the
rest to the actual incandescent core of things

Those white horses of the second stanza have
hardly moved but now suddenly
raise their heads and run together
as if the rain were riders or whips
urging them on

And so is our own beauty dormant until
roused and washed in God’s sunlight

and like the wet flanks of those horses
ripples with the musculature of joy

---

2/8/2007 (from Invention of the Wheel)

Categories: Poems