Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.
Out the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch—
one maple leaf lifted back.
I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:
Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.
Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured; not-yet-
Not-yet-not.
I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.
"Not Yet" by Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart. © Harper Collins, 1997. Reprinted with permission
