PRAISE WHAT COMES

Praise can be an active response for the many gifts that we receive every day if we but open our eyes to them. Gifts of love, gifts of life, gifts from the world around us. But let these exquisite words of the poet express what our heart can feel:

Praise What Comes

surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved
of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health
that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise.

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books:
that are your food and your hunger, nightfall and walks
before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs
you never intended. At the end there may be no answers
and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one
of the many names of God? At the intersections,
the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and
possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,
did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

– From The Light of Invisible Bodies, by Jeanne Lohmann

[Suggestion: read it aloud, paying attention to the punctuation]

Loren Bullock
August 23, 2013