Winter takes me
and asks me,
“Are you a survivor?”
Do you sleep?
Do you your own life
firm and tender
in your arms,
like a prized child
or creature keep?
Do you apply
even on the darkest day
at least a modicum of
salves
to lavish love
upon your range of selves,
from earthly low and fallible
to the ones that more approximate
the dwellers of the starry heavens
and the filled with gray and billowy clouds
or crystal blue bright sunny skies?
Do you find ways to embrace
your fellow humans near
or wherever they are
high, low, abroad, asky, awater,
and find for them at least a corner of your
flowing heart,
if not a very central place. . .
Do you know
that that is not only good for them,
but deeply, too, for you?
That your life blood
is more than just the red that dwells within your web of veins inside
but too, the sweetly scattered rains
that quench
roots, branches, leaves, and fruits of your connections?
And that the larks or calculated risks you take
that flutter forth in hopes to touch
as many out there
as your frightened rabbit nerves can bear?
And can you yet remember this
when on gray days
the cloudy view that drapes you
as you sit and muse or veg
so wistful by your window?
And,
can you choose to do
and come to know
a little more
than stare and
whittle idle time,
which, even when you go slow or still,
all too very fast gets used?
Can you thus choose
to give yourself
and folks and creatures in your scope
a surer chance to be
the things and ways
that let us
and mend what’s rent,
with greater ease,
and heal what pines
to be all whole,
so that they and you
and we
can wield
the power of our wise bloody, strong
mortal and immortal hearts
even better thus,
to know
and grow?
The Danforth Anchor 