Life Burns

LIFE BURNS

These days I think about the state of our world,

what tomorrow brings knowing the future is here.

The world rolls forward in a tumbleweed of speed

I have no desire in keeping with. I crave living

light as the girl I was basking in sunshine. A slice

of lakeshore just thirty steps from home I treated

as my own, receiving its gifts, a birthright. Now

worry is hard to shake and my questions grow

unruly as ivy that won’t be tamed. If I cut them

low to the soil, they leap back. If I tear out their

roots, they rise more resistant. For now, I leave

all my worry at the doorstep, drive to the woods

following a dirt path to visit a pond—a marshy

pond mid pines, a haven for tadpoles, damselflies,

tree frogs, newts, and toads. Every year the pond

depends on summer’s bounty and winter’s dormancy.

I’m learning pond creatures have instinctual rituals:

the painted turtle enters murky waters, dives down,

burrows in mud. Surviving a cold that kills, she won’t

draw air into her lungs for five harrowing months.

Her heart slows, nearly stops, body temperature falls

just short of freezing, under layers of ice cradled

in darkness she waits. Depleting oxygen strains

every atom, shell shrivels, muscles begin to burn

pulling calcium out her bones. If she surfaces

too soon, she dies. As I walk by the frozen pond

I think of her wondering, it must burn, how could it

not burn, waiting to breathe. I, too, am surviving

the cold and bearing weight of murky unknowns

with summer days a distant memory. Living isn’t

easy; it’s depleting. Yet slowly I’m embracing

the questions. That one day I will emerge with sun

warming my face—a whole new lease on life.

Forest Gifts and This Worldly Grace