(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
~Sara Teasdale “There Will Come Soft Rains”
…one of man’s purposes is to assist God
in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation.
By a tremendous heave of the spirit,
the devout man frees the divine sparks
trapped in the mute things of time;
he uplifts the forms and moments of creation,
bearing them aloft
into the rare air and hallowing fire
in which all clays must shatter and burst.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble
and steam:
“Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
~Ray Bradbury from the end of his 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”
So much of the world is beset by smoke and ashes this summer.
Not only are the fires roaring uncontrolled across landscapes, consuming everything in their path,
but harrowing fires burn within us as well.
We too are consumed,
left in a haze of gray and dust.
Even the smoke-painted sun traverses the sky
and then settles and sets,
swallowed by a seed puff ball,
absorbed and hallowed.
Like us, may it be released aloft this morning
transformed like a seed freed to the wind,
to rise unfettered and holy.
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