A poem from Sam Shepard

Stay
and watch the next set of possibilities
arise
and fall away
What have you got to lose
but everything
piece by piece
everything
day by day

-Sam Shepard

The Work

It is the work
of all her days
the lily’s construction
of the tower
of herself.

Birthed from burial
into the sun’s
life-giving gaze,
the air and water and earth
gather into her veins.
Not knowing what she's
surviving into,
she hopes towards
her apex,
and arrives at days
of glory and love.

She beds raindrops
on her petals,
and takes dances
with bees.
Face fully blush, shadowless,
she strives to a sun
she will never reach,
but on highest, longest days
blesses her with his gaze,

before abandoning
his fragile guests
to a merciless gray.
They hold so
desperately to a life
they never asked for,
a life of never going anywhere
or doing anything but
gathering and growing,
of knowing no direction
but up and down,
as they shrivel and fall
in the great choreography
of the season
of death.

The wind goes looting,
ripping the candy and color
from the flesh of the once
brilliant things,
burying it under one great
tarp of white.
The Lily, rather than watch
her own leaves drip black,
throws her petals and pollen dust
to the earth
for next year’s orphans,
and bows back
to the dirt,
with grace,
terrible
grace.
Her work accomplished.