Psalm 23

The snow is melting,
the end
of the colorless season,
a time of melting
and floods,
waters running wild,
spilling the banks, melting
too fast for the ground to absorb,
changing fields into lakes,
creeks into rivers,
wild with exuberation
softening the earth,
rendering it mud,
unstable,
reforming under your feet
into craters and ruts,
deep markers
of the change of season.

Your eyes survey the fields
and there is,
not green exactly,
but a change,
an emergence of color,
a reminder that all winters die,
and even
if there is more snow
in the devil’s fury,
it is only hell’s final fling,

The die is cast.
The seasons change.
Love and color, even here,
even after the most brutal winters,
color always,
always,

rises.

About this poem

Steeped in scripture this weekend, more for my own benefit than for any preaching or teaching.

After church yesterday, I went out and took pictures of mud season, that time when the snow melts and the creeks rise and the fields and yards become lakes for a while. When finally color shows itself. The willows in the picture sang to me, not yet green, but no longer quite dead with winter. A metaphor for where I am personally on so many fronts.

It is not just my mother’s death. That is the tip of the iceberg of what is happening around me and those I love right now. I am living in an emotional torrent. But like winter. Like mud season, it will pass. Seasons do.

And I thought of Psalm 23. Oddly, the word that lept out at me was “Green”. Life. And so somewhere, this poem simmered, melting the snow of my rawness, slowly, incompletely, inexorably.

Tom