How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

by Barbara Kingsolver

is no granite boulder, praised for its size. It’s the water that parts around it, moving mountains.

Mercy wears lightning bolts on her shoulder. Threads of fire in her white hair. The face of the sun.

stamped a map called home on a life

untouched island in the churning human torrent,

How quickly a roving family may find togetherness.

We watch clouds tease like a veil across the forested bluffs, but she is watching the mountain, her true north.

a blue where anything could be hiding behind an alibi of sepia ink.

Get up and make intentions.

May I say that life is filled with instructions we just don’t believe we are ever going to need?

That we, the birds and I, may be text and illumination in your book of common prayer.