Remembering our Descendants

The day comes when you realize

you are not young anymore, at least

not in the way you thought you would stay~

though the heart leaps always

with the coursing of the eternal spring.

The wheel turns~the circle widens

and you now occupy a simpler place~

the circle of your importance dissolving,

until you see that you are more

a field of light than the flaming arrow

that once burned a hole through the sky.

And in this harvest, we feed the world

with our offerings, fully given.

And the rest, the chaff, goes back into the fire

that sustains those who will come long after

we are gone from this place.

After the inevitability of our fall,

of our many falls, after the surrender

to our own exquisite dismemberments,

we know we are not any of the identities

that have ever claimed us. Ever.

Some things are created and destroyed~

and this life is a long kiss that opens us

to the beauty of our own disaster

and inevitability of our blessed return.

We know the way grief and ecstacy

couple again and again ~like two hawks

spiraling up the current. And from those heights

we cry out, as we see our own changing face

in the sea waves, in the wildflowers,

in our children running full stride

in the fields of the world.

If only we could wear these wings

of our second life with unwavering love

and merciful ferocity~and live as the ancestors

our descendants will remember

as the ones who would not turn away

from the impossible

or give up when all seemed lost.

Yes~ as the ones who held nothing back

as they rode through the center of the storm

relentlessly tending what matters most.