The Open Hand of a Child

The Open Hand of a Child

by Unknown

Between the two walnut trees
Where deer pass silent through into the evening,
There is where the echo hovers green and mossy,
Bells half here, half there
The sounds of invisible presence mourning,
Observing the absence, the touch remembered –
If you could see it, the mark still there
Where this and that, I and Thou,
Lost track of distinctions.

No one without imagination can know love;
Clean, tart as cherries stolen
From the neighbor’s orchard when desire
Overcomes the limits of logic, the restrictions
Of dull matter unloved.
See the tangled mass of ivy
Imagining itself a tree by clinging to the tallest
Sycamore to reach impossible heights,
To touch the soaring heron wings

Ask the stars if their old light burned, blazed as
A mere combustion of gases seizing chemical opportunity
To birth breath, flesh, eyes,
The gaze aware?
No, but surely it was the imagined possibilities of
Yet uncreated plum blossoms,
The lure of a veined dragonfly wing,
The call of rhythmic rain on meandering rivers,
The open hand of a child that
Imagined the world into being.

Anon