in the ongoing,

if I still bother to snap off the geraniums’ dying leaves

and prune and water, and they winter through

to bloom again,

if the scuttle of autumn fades golden to brown, winter

strips its color, and spring lifts yellow-green heads,

if the harvested rows in the proud field climb over the rise,

lie fallow in strange beauty, and replenished by resting,

grow another crop,

if growth in the mutant swamp is neon green, unfamiliar, and the

new plants settle and find their place,

if what’s sacred to me has no face or voice or name in a holy book

and for you the sacred is the man and the book?

In these small ways, we go on.

Still, jacked-up rainstorms plunge villages into the ocean,

vast swathes of refugees move across barren deserts in search of a livable place,

crimes against children go unchecked though we look in horror,

plastic garbage in the Pacific has grown three times the size of France,

and I sit before you, grateful for the rest of you, exposed in our despair.

Can anything save us except the old abstractions:

morality, courage, kindness, beauty, and love,

not save us exactly, just make more bearable whatever we have left?