Bare Grain
The farmer knows:
What you sow is not the body that shall be —
but only a bare grain,
a seed,
hard and small in the hand.
You could hold it forever
and never guess the wheat.
Never guess the stalk,
the bending-in-the-wind of it.
And the fish beneath the surface —
she has known water all her life.
She has known the silver ceiling,
the beautiful lid of her world,
light broken into lace above her.
Yet she cannot guess the sky.
Cannot imagine the horizon,
the thousand miles of weather
pressing down on the other side
of what she calls up.
And I —
I thought I was holding Bryan.
His warm known weight,
the hand I had held
ten thousand times.
I was holding the husk.
I was holding the seed.
I was holding the underside
of something already unfurling past me
into a sky I could not see —
sprawling, white, ethereal,
wispy as feathers,
soft as diffuse light,
covering the whole heaven
with a brightness
the body had only hinted at.
The grain cannot imagine the wheat.
The fish cannot imagine the sky.
My arms could not imagine
the soul they had been carrying
all those years.
Inspired by: 1 Cor. 15:37
