It Is Beyond Me
By
Joseph Anthony Petro

 
I do not understand how I can be filled with such a sprawling emptiness.
I try letting the spring overtake me:
The trees breaking open with their flowers of colored light,
The ground erupting with tulips and daffodils who so clearly want sky and bees,
The robin eggs bluer than the sky filling secret nests with the wings of the future,
The silent flock of deer wandering the graveyards of my attempts to pretend, to obliterate
Myself– how they nibble at the moon-drenched grass at my feet,
How they touch my hands with their velvety lips,
Still–there is still a gray wind stuck in the tree of my soul.
I do not understand how such a desolate wasteland could just appear
After all the work I have done to cultivate prayer, to garden my heart, to reach out, to love myself.
It is beyond me.
Somehow I walk—a stranger in the town of my own life, no longer surprised
At the devastation, at the ground full of flower petals,
At the broken robin eggs on the grass, at the daffodils curling in on themselves,
At the riots, the stupidity, the greed, the betrayals,
At the mirror looking back with such vacancy into such a nowhere
That it is unbelievable I still exist. And please
Don’t talk to me of ingratitude. Anemia spreads
Through the veins of my spirit without my consent, there is a famine moving like
A procession of ghosts through the fields of my ability to sing.
Please just look away, and please just hold me until it is beyond me,
Until it is unbelievable that I could have ever felt this way,
Until I can breathe again in a life full of spring.