Have you ever noticed
there’s a time in life,
I mean on earth,
when it is not day
and it is not night.
and if you look
only down, and see only
the dark over the land,
you might not realize
that day is already
flying through the air,
sun-hook at the ready,
poised to pull back the blanket,
revealing all the ugliness
on earth, again, it is true.
Yet…
Long ago, inventor-seer
Jakob Böhme, espied
in a dark that was not fully night,
and in a dawn that was not yet fully day,
the first mote of sunlight
hitting the edge of a pewter plate
on the rough wood of the table.
And this he spoke about for the rest
of his life as being the transformative moment.
Not the squalor. Not the mouths to feed.
Not the twenty-five hours of work per day,
not the iron mittens, nor
the wood dragged from afar.
But instead, looking up,
remembering First Sky,
Steaming Newborn Earth:
the Splendor.