DANCING THE MUSE - Danial Neil

  A boy alone in the woods hears ancient sounds, melodies, songs of the dead   He waits for the answer to the questions his father breathed into him   And he will listen his whole life, as patiently as a single tree waits to become a forest   On the day he sat in the rain with the sweetness of earth and trillium, maples dripped rhymes on his tongue   A verse, a poem, a story all pointing to what he would always know, that nothing lives without the other      

I see daisies in June rising from the wastes, those weeds that haunt our momentary neglect   How we disparage the ranks of them peering over the thresholds of the manicured   They illumine the rural roads, bend for the goldfinches gathering like lemons, pull our eyes to the little suns   Oh, the glower of futile perfectionists, bitter with sickle and hoe who think this world is for them  

the length of vision, the short and the long dance in the head, tempt and bother us with senseless things the moon dies in the amber fires, a conflagration of the selfish fuse that drives the world what will our children say about us, a generation who created catastrophic changes to the Earth, and at the same time had the power to prevent it?

Come to the margins of rock and ruin, stubbled and beaten like dried parchment coiled to a fine scrap, a willful life swelling from May rain Out in the desert something happens that will steal your breath, put you down on your scabby knees old friend, the petals unfurling at noon just for you, along the hillsides and benches above the deep lakes Now the tributes are coming in from the anointed ones who know what to look for, bitterroot showing the world what can be done from nothing, how life redeems itself from yesterday’s loss  

reach with your limbs hold up the sky you are my arms rooted to the earth against eternity you are my legs bend in the wind never will break you are my resilience a song in the crowns the melody of history you are my keeper a breath for you is a breath for me you are my life a thousand years to grow a minute to die you are my legacy the wail of your fall a weeping in the forests you are my language