Easter Moon

I have called a friend who says he is sitting on his front step
watching a bald eagle who is watching him, carefully,
from the crown of a Sitka spruce. I tell him it is an omen for good.

He is labouring under a sentence, lodged in the linings of a lung,
                                                   brittle fascicles of worry,
like stiff dry grass thrust through February snow.

I have called the sea-fogged hills and the big-leaf maples
and have asked them why, on this planet shrouded in soft
hallowed light, our souls, like raptors, remain restless,
                                                                          for illumination.

I have seen cities, with grieving houses, where
somewhere, in a seldom-used kitchen, a sixties song
is breaking the heart of an aging woman, somewhere,
in a lonesome bedroom, a boy is trained by a slim screen.
somewhere, a girl in high school is in the back of a police car,
                                                              somewhere, more sirens.

I have called to the rain. I said, “Add my tears to your flask.”
I have called to my parents, and friends, who have passed,
who, like mute doves in distant places,
echo my long silent mourning, and still,
I hear the cantering beauty of their voices.

I turned to God and shouted, “Does being have a meaning?”
and round some parabolic room, came Mystery’s whisper,
“Ask instead, does meaning have a Being?”

And I thought of the risen Christ, and I called
to the Easter moon that rose above the paschal sky,
and in the light of morning, I saw the eagle and the rain
and the boy and the sea-fogged hills and the city of sorrow,
with its cemetery at the limits, and I asked,
“Who are in these graves?” And Christ said,
                                                                  “No one!”

And suddenly I heard, as though above the hem of time, all beings 
of earth, mothers and fathers, companions and partners,
                                              cry out with love.