A complicated emotion can serve good ends and bad,

reveal the truth of who we are and what

we must have to go on, declare

our refusal to surrender,

even signal our strength, passion

for life, or

it can crowd the space between us

until no one can think straight, only react,

fight back, turning a small thing

into an end-of-the-world scenario.

We’re in a courtyard moment

where the truth is on trial,

as it so often is

when people feel threatened

one way or another, pressured

to perform

for or against more quietly held

beliefs, the ones that bring

them peace to be at home

in their own spiritual skin.

as time grows short, and shadows long

love must be seen, made plain

to win the day, uphold the banner of God, high

over the field, the grain now waving

at the feet of the coming

harvesters, so late

it seems…

Kindness is a universal language, but that doesn’t mean

everyone speaks it. Only that we recognize it

when and where we find it.

He had spent a lifetime, it seemed,

in and out of hospitals, but mostly in. The halls

his normal walking route. The Great Room his Getaway.

The windows opaque, used now as mirrors

for when the nurses came in to change the bandages

and he watched over their shoulder while

lying on his side, thinking for all that might be outside

the window, these walls, the gray Hospital—

it would never be as simple, delineated as his life

as Patient. Did he want to get well?

What a question.