Agraria_Journal_WINTER_2022

After the fire, what next? Not the old words, aged with bitterness or despair. Not habitual regrets and griefs. Not just a reflection of anyone’s ideas. But what’s right here: wind rising through a tower of cottonwood. Cicadas motoring their 17-year song. Golden moon half revealed by the silver of the passing cloud. Good things, bad things happen. News dissolves our vision of the world. Not to say what’s lost doesn’t make us ache or strip our days of reds so vibrant we forget what we were thinking. But whatever is lost also brings us to this window composed of lush darkness, the rush or rain through the leaves, the sudden chill dissolving the hot anger or anguish, the pain of the questions that, left unanswered, might divide us. The music of the old house outlives the house. We will make new murals out of the ruins, mosaics from all that’s broken, stone soup at the center of our next feast. Nothing in this world vanishes. Even ghosts, loved enough, turn into angels. The dark shows us what calls not at the edge of what we sense but from the center of where we live. Nothing can take away the power of the real. Seeing in the Dark Barn’s burnt down now I can see the moon —Masahide, 1657-1723 CARYN MIRRIAM-GOLDBERG Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, from Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Tempests, and Thunderous Skies in Word and Image and How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems. Find more about her, including her blog, “Everyday Magic,” at CarynMirriamGoldberg.com. BACKGROUND PHOTO BY STEPHEN LOCKE