Divine Intervention

Morning Walk, Uffing 50 x 70 cm acryl on canvas by Karin Goeppert

DIVINE INTERVENTION

If children laugh at you, and dogs bark at your hair,

don’t worry about it: they love you. Who wouldn’t?

And the world is not a shopping mall. It is a garden,

a garden within gardens. Prowling beneath the fronds

are beautiful animals, and we love them hard. And

there are moments. There are still some moments.

Someone I know, a poet of sorts, once told me

he went for a run on the island of Samos.  Up through the olive trees.

Fresh Aegean morning, just before the heat drops

its full weight on your head; the quiet unruffled sea giving off

a beaten golden sheen. Not even vaguely devout, he nevertheless

raises his hands and praises Zeus. Offers thanks for the literally

awesome light and its revelation of gnarled limbs, the writhing trunks

and a Swedish or Danish girl in shorts and t-shirt picking her way

down the path smiling at me as if after a night of love. And for

the goofy little gesture of lifting my palms to the sky I thank you as well.

Would be greedy to ask for more.  Not that that’s ever stopped me.