Come
Find your way
over the quiet earth,
under the charged skies.
Look across the emptied fields
and up at the geese
in their ordered disarray.
See the few apples
still holding to the stem.
Come to the table.
Find your way.
Don’t deny hunger leaning
hard against your door.
Remember those things
easy to forget.
Uplift the lost
and blessings made manifest.
Find your way.
Come to the table.
Let thanks and giving
brush sweet against your cheek,
then watch the deer step
into the deeper wood
As you raise your glass
and mouth prayers
into the chill.
Thanks & Giving
There is that place where a scent, an edge of light, a nameless wind can turn your eyes to the heavens. That same place where, as a child, you held some stone, some amulet, some precious nothing in your hand knowing that if you never let it go or if you buried it under the moss or squirreled it away in the back of some drawer that all that terrified you couldn’t turn you to stone. That place where with no one around but God or god and maybe the river you were filled up and filled up again. That place where you never greeted despair with powdered words but as another traveler on the road. That place you could look through the window and beyond — look out as though you were skipping the smoothest stone across the silence, across loud and wordless prayers, across grieving and gratitude, across grace, across all that has ever been held in your hand or mine — across days where Thanks and Giving knew their names and at times did not. That place across this table, that table, every table that knows the harvest of heart and home and neighbor and need as we ask once more, ask to become our blessings.
