Gratitude
-by Barbara Crooker
This week, the news of the world is bleak, another wargrinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die offor twenty or thirty miserable years—And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a manwith silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many timeshave I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shinesthrough the pink wisteria with its green and white leavesas if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry treethat one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole worldsings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’ssweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffingon the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green handsin gratitude, bend to the sky.
Posted by kind permission of the poet. First published in Poetry East; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008); and recently in Gratefulness.org May 2018.