Praise What Comes

A poem by Jeanne Lohmann, a Quaker poet. I think she wrote this just a few years before her death at 95. Some beautiful lines; I hope they will resonate with you as they do with me. (What is my task in the world?).

Surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven’t deserved

of days and solitude, your body’s immoderate good health

that let’s you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books

that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks

before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs

you never intended. At the end there may be no answers

and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one

of the many names of God? At the intersections,

the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping off-places between fear and

possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,

did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

Jeanne Lohmann