Last Things

I’m always struggling for a way

to write about who you are, Father,

because it’s easier to tell someone

how morning light splices the first minutes

into thousands of tree-lined avenues,

or the smell of wet magnolia petals

revive our steps on the spring hillsides.

These are things people have held,

even if only briefly, as a day ended.

But that’s it: they ended and will end

and after the last spring passes,

after the final petal molders into soil

and even after light ferments into

a fracture of fading stars, you will be

as you always have been: what is enough.