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A planning, a challenging —
another child,
timed and prepared to fit
our schedules.
Everything seemed to proceed easily.
But plans are that only
nothing more
Thanksgiving weekend
I bartered with God.
Please let this baby live.
We want it so much.
Give me a reason for giving thanks,
give me this child,
this bit of immortality.
But God had other plans.
Deep, immeasurable grief
years later, at Thanksgiving
the waves of loss —
of potential, of possibility,
of a soul connected to mine
gone.
Yet unexpected gifts
a community
of women
of friends
of love
shared my grief
Controls
plans
schedules
vastly overrated
ultimately self-deluding.
I opened up to possibilities.
My second son is special
as all children are
but also in miraculous recognition
without the miscarriage
he would not be.
In him
made manifest
God’s lesson in love and hope.
The cliche,
“What will be, will be”
profoundly comforts.
This child is what will be,
the other not.
Simple.
Difficult.
True.
(c) Lydia A. Schultz, 2009
Given we just had snow (7 inches) yesterday, I thought I would share a poem that talks about natural wonder. Although I now live in Minnesota, I find myself often returning to my hometown and Pennsylvania when I write.
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Natural Epiphanies
Among the smokestacks, buildings,
pollutants, steel,
of my childhood town
God was an abstraction,
impenetrable.
But camping in wild hills
of whitetails and hemlock
I could feel God’s glory.
The stretches of wild blackberries and huckleberries,
The shimmering aspen leaves,
The coy May apples under their umbrellas,
The delicate sassafras leaves in their threefold variety,
Black-eyed Susans, lacy Queen Annes,
Grasshoppers dancing ahead while we walked.
The profusion of it all —
Racoons seeking refuse
Newts under rotting logs
Groundhogs waddling beside dirt roads
Wild turkeys raising a ruckus in the brush
A bull snake, crushed and broken on the road,
Her eggs exposed for us to see
Spiders in their webs in the corners of outhouses.
Here I could imagine a god
using these places as a palette.
At my first camp job,
I escaped the children and routine.
My blaze orange poncho glowed,
rain dripped on my glasses.
I moved through an impressionist painting.
Light trickled through leaves
Wet grasses brushed knees
Brambles grabbed at sleeves
Low branches swiped at my face.
Until — suspended in time, rooted in place —
Poised, we stared at each other
Breathless, that instant captured us
Knowingly, our eyes shared understanding
Then the deer bounded off.
I was alone, connected.
Now, deceptive stillness
fills the urban yard.
Snow covers brush piles
Pine branches fill with snow
Oak limbs create abstract patterns
of hoar frost in the sky.
But life spills out with of a shimmer of sun.
Chickadees, feathers puffed for warmth
Squirrels, scavenging acorns
Blue jays, on alert
A grey rabbit, peeking through shrubs
A cardinal, singing flamboyantly
Snow-suited children, exploding with energy.
Here too, amid the trees,
I seek the ineffable —
on my face, I feel the wind
bringing me
to what is.
Copyright (c) Lydia A. Schultz