about Hannah Coulter

(a new poem, written today)

For Hannah

For a thousand lifetimes you have belonged to the quiet

of an early Kentucky morning, to a day so young the ground

slopes as you intake breath, the light coating it in muted

history.  So many days you’ve watched the world beginning.

In your lifetime you have learned to let the land you live on

make you, and you have learned to open yourself to winter –

to its loses and grief, to the fetters of a cold leaving,

then to open up to the bounty of spring.

In an undisturbed silence you have found your membership

among the ones nearest to you, and have worked at it.  

You have built and you have journeyed to the bounds

of eternity together -  you have wept and danced.

For a thousand lifetimes, desire and satisfaction have been meeting

in your rooms, casting the sunrise like paint upon the walls. 

Your memory of things come to you in surprises, often as you

walk the land where you made your love, learning always

from the ground as it makes room inside itself for things to grow.
There is peace as the world dresses itself in the early light.