How on Earth

How can everything simply be gift and given? With nothing for us to figure out or solve
No mystery to resolve save how to open our arms wider than the windows, to let the wind in?

What we’re left with is an emptiness like a throbbing thumb, and deep inside
This endless yearning to be held, which is all anything is—the longing and the way we close or open our hands

We learn like deer on ice, scrambling up into the waterfall of sunlight

So I scramble—
A way from the purchases that once kept me safe;
Held by the forest, in the sun’s pattern scattered through an uneven canopy of leaves
And the patter of last night’s rainfall, still trickling down like drum beats

Inviting us to have no shape
To fall
To think of ourselves not at all
But to rise, instead, with the earth, as into a mother’s hug
And into the same bright morning
Becoming gift itself
All our nouns becoming verbs
In the light of the white, pink morning