And when light
comes from nowhere I can see,
when my soul is clothed in
golden bandages, ribbons of grace,
how can I tell you? Or even tell myself
so I can write it down? No words
are bright enough to catch
those fingerprints of radiance
that flicker on my wall.
~Luci Shaw from “I Say Light, Thinking” in Harvesting Fog

That afternoon, the air’s large hand
took hold of their backyard
apricot tree, the one that
had fruited, bountifully, a lush yield
in late summer, caught it in a downdraft
of chill, shook it lightly, again, again,
loosening each leaf from its
thumb of stem.
For two days I watched
the leaves’ pale, ground-ward drift,
each leaf singly, in its
gentle shedding, among all
the glints of gold,
each crumpled flick of fiber
from its stem’s thumb
a departure, a declaration.
An announcement, God saying,
gently, Thank You for
a lovely job. Now,
time to let go.
~Luci Shaw “Loewy’s Apricot Tree, Fall 2022”

Here God lives, burrowing among
the petals, cross-
pollinating. Here is Christ’s mind
juiced, joined, fleshed, celled.

Here is the clash,
the roil, an invasion, not gentle
as dew; the rose is unfurled
violently until the scent explodes
and detonates in the air

And oh, it trembles—
thousands of seeds ripen in it as
it reels in the wind.
~Luci Shaw from “Flower Head” from Polishing the Petoskey Stone

I awake with my mind as askew as my hair,
brushing away the cobwebs of dreams,
smoothing down worries ever present,
curling the whiff of memories long forgotten.

And I realize these same molecules transmitting my thoughts
also carried Christ’s while He walked this earth;
the earthbound thoughts of God Himself,
borne by His integration of chemistry with ions,
in millions of electrical explosions per second.

My own mind trembles with the thought of it:

here God lives and shines His Light,
here He leaves His radiant fingerprints,
here He thinks in Words I understand,
here He loves, catching me when I let go…