Resurrection on the 4th of July

Red, white, & blue Monday in the blog.

Lovely weekend with family wamily. Swimming, talking, eating, go-carts in the rain.

Plus City Museum of St. Louis.  A total wow experience!  I climbed higher (on ladders and spokes) and lower (down tunnels of rock) than I ever imagined I would with these old bones!

But we were insulated from the bad news about the Exxon oil spill in the Yellowstone River and came home to that awareness. Sigh...

So here is a poem from Living on the Earth. For some reason coming-back-to-life after a period of distance and numbness hits home with a number of readers/hearers. It may capture the mixed mood I feel right now, with the actual fireworks audible in the hometown distance as I type.

Resurrection on the 4th of July

I can't reach anyone anymore,
bound hand and foot by graveclothes.

On the deck under the grapevines
a tall thin man who makes flowerboxes
from fallen tree branches
offers me half a Weiss beer
with a slice of lemon in a paper cup.

I avoid my husband, my old friends.
They don't see the miracle,
they only recoil from the stench
of what's over.
                         I sit on the cooler
till someone needs another beer,
then plunge my dead fingers into the ice
for a stranger.

My face is bound about by a napkin
to keep my jaw from hanging open

in perpetual awe.

The man who writes about jazz
gives me a plate of blackberries.
One by one they dissolve on my tongue.
My belly still functions, my womb lunges for a child
running down the wooden steps.

Fireworks begin in the alley,
a great spoked wheel of flame
between the fence boards.

No one notices the light.
Maybe I've come too far from the stone.