if ever

if ever there was a time for laughter let it be now--this perfect hour--this infinite instant; let us laugh at the world around us whichever undying part remains--not verging on the lip of annihilation, poised for the eternal forgetting.

if ever there was a time to sing let it be now--these open windows, the throats from which music does not distinguish its notes--the wind, the echo in a canyon--these sunset waves splurging on the sand; let us tilt our ears leeward to catch it all and shake loose from our own knotty reserves some nameless tune that no one will remember but which will cling like a fine dust to everything it catches.

if ever there was a time to love let it be now--feel the easy embrace of the chair we grunt into each day--notice how the bedsheets part for our sibilant sleep, the night generous with its ticking hours, moon just so--discover how whole the body can be wrapping itself around an ice cream cone; the farewell we offer a friend going to Africa, the parting wish we leave at the airport's sliding glass doors--notice how unfraudulent the heart is whispering us closer to a baby boy who offers us his batting eyelashes; how easy we can cleave from the hard, lost day a fractured second of joy, eyes enraptured with the sight of a small breeze lifting plastic bags into an aerial dance just for us.

and if ever there was a time to pause and stand, broken, before God, weep at the sight of all that is beautiful and finite, our hands having cast their breadcrumbs, the birds scattering toward home, time impossible in its never enoughness, if ever there was a time to pause and to ache in the falling--light signaling our last, glorious view of the world, let it be now.

Maya Stein--official interpreter of the soul.