Woman, in your mystical garment of spring’s fragile beauty
a luminous mesh woven of life flowing forth from darkness
made of living freshness to dress you in beauty, how do
you speak from within your wisdom of knowing that beauty
does not last through all seasons of time’s passing, for its
silken freshness blessed by zephyrs is soon met by rays of
summer that dull its luminous brightness and sear the beauty
that is your life to wear through all seasons,

and autumn winds will knife it into patches of mere
gossamer blown and caught on dying grass and dry bushes
assaulted by storms that strip leaves and limbs from trees left
bare against sky’s face bunched into blizzards’ reminding that
flesh, bark, and stone’s mass – sentient or not – are but sediment
and ash without sight without sound without music.

Oh! If this visitation of bleakness be so, how am I, Woman,
to speak to the question brooding over creation:
Is the Universe friendly? *  Is it a question meant neither to be
asked nor lived, but only endured?  Therefore, in spite of
a portent of such emptiness of meaning, I, Woman, will ask my
own question, the same that I, resolute, go on asking the world,
the universe, the cosmos, the creation-by-whatever-name,

“From where comes this bias toward love and connection that
attends me with such seriousness of soughing – as wind does
in its moving around me – as breath does in its flowing through
me – as if in longing that I surrender in trust and in love to what
is within and beyond me that opens the way to the miracle of
my being awake to the immensity of everything,

the wonder of being on this earth, this small living place
where all is gift given, but for a while, from a source of generosity
that never stops flowing – as celestial music flows in its release
beyond the boundary of repose –

a mystery that goes on weaving all things all seasons together
each in its own beauty to form a web of silk and worsted that
weighs heavier than ruin and is made of living life’s paradox
of sorrow’s wedded connection to joy in a world that asks to be
loved that much and remembered as a Lenten story that God
longs for us to tell in a Gaudium of rejoicing as the most beautiful
story of love in the world.

Note: “Is the universe friendly? is the most essential question we must ask.”
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist who developed the theory of relativity. *

Margie Dimoplon