The Ministry of Rolling Hills

   Since I was a youth…ashes to ashes…
   flesh clasped by flesh…we all fall down.

Singsong innocence veneered
a deep shadow of realness underneath…
we all – this all – does fall down
and out of life eventually:

  All kinds of posies pocketed in hopes of delaying
      the future which bears all of us away,
   in our smallness we realize not
      the limit to our days.
 
  And so in my youth…ashes to ashes…
  hands in tight hands…we all fall down…

The current current of creation
is, by boundlessly understood grace,
toward a thing whose only side
we know from our side is death.

  Even yet as all decays
      still what it offers for the seeing
is missed by our growing up,
     and before that in our whirring.

  With my failing youth…ashes to ashes…
  Hands in loosening hands…we all fall down.

Our spinning circle of kids
 a micro circle of life…
if only we’d realize just how
rosey our ring really is:

 Mountains blue with laughter,
   rippling under babbling sunlight,
     splashes of birdsong and wing
         and persistent cicadas dot the night.
      Even as such particulars wither, wilt and lie:
   that they’re part of a larger dancing
means they’ll never fully die.