My Neighbour’s Hydrangeas – Lenten Considerations Leaning Toward Easter

Taking into consideration,
a Merlot-mellow chord progression, 
or the sight of a great grey owl
surveying a ravine from an aspen limb,
or, in spite of sorrow, that silent power
that wants me to live,
why wouldn’t I spend my days being happy?

And if I take all four seasons just the way they come,
patient as an old horse nodding in summer’s sun,
in winter, pawing clear a spot in the pasture,
quiet there, recalling those spring-blossom words:
though your heart condemns you, I do not —
why wouldn’t I fall in love with every human face?

Or if I was reduced to an atom of dust,
clinging to dew as dew clung to me,
and we’d join a cloud weighing more than a bus
then burst over hills burdened by thirst —
wouldn’t that be enough to reclaim me, free
me from the grip of all my grim dreams?

Or if I was a heap of egg shells, crushed
and worked into the soil along my rickety fence,
and so adding, in a year or two,
majestic blotches of blue
to my neighbour’s hydrangeas — wouldn’t that be enough
of a life? Wouldn’t people exclaim far into the night?
Lord, Lord, ain’t that some kinda resurrection!