Ladybug

Taking the first breath of the day

with outrageous delight.

Organizing 700,000 protesters

on a march for justice.

Knitting a wool blanket for a baby.

Building a sustainable earth-friendly outhouse.

Painting plum blossoms in April
or winning the Nobel Prize for Economics.

All things being equal, you give up 

looking for significance.

What really matters is gratefully

offering your last exhalation.

You give up searching for anything
more meaningful than how to brew

and stir and pour green tea, 

the way your hand moves, whether

you’re alone or serving a guest.

The slightest rise and fall of your belly

is a moon sacrament pulling the sea.

You put ten million years into the way

you lift a spoon, your body

a mirage in the still blue sky.

This must be why you feel like dancing.

When did the dance begin? Was it now?

At last, after lifetimes of labor,   

you find the vast in the small,

the dust mote in the elephant’s ear.

On your fingertip, dissolving beauty

of innumerable suns in a snowflake.

This galaxy we're lost in on a snail's back.

At midnight, a moth-wing reveals

the silver-blue pin-wheel nebula.

A horoscope of frost at your gray

Winter window tells ancestral stories 

foreshadowing the shape of eternity.

This could be the moment of your death.

Or not. Does it matter? You are lying

in a meadow on a summer afternoon.

Your heart, which has been breaking

for decades, finally pries itself open.

A Ladybug lands, ever so softly on a weed 

that bends among green cathedral arches 

into a nave, leading inward, woven 

of thistle and sunbeam.

You never imagined your translucent angel 

could enfold you in such vivid veils,

or so buxom and tiny descend in her

crimson gown, starry with imperial opals,

black portals to the center of creation,

unfathomable infinitesimal pools

where you gaze as she gathers your

last breath and carries you gently through,

not into another world but deeper 

into this one.

____________

Listen to this poem HERE