By Patricia Saunders

Taking wings

I am falling in emptiness with no handrail to clutch,
I am drawing in breath and plunging down passageways
with invisible steps that vanish when trod.
I am dim with night, and full of light,
transparent in darkness and weightless in space
My soul takes wings and soars through air
like a graceful, delicate flower in spring.

Ah time, cruel time,
you are not lingering for me
and the cloudless sun is vanishing into dusk.
I cannot stop the restless current that draws me away
nor can I stop the measureless sky as it becomes the bounded earth.
I must wait for my spirit to fall and fall again,
so that it can find the quiet passageway without a handrail
that will take me to a world beyond imagining.

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Time is Eternal

Stillness.
Emotion comes and goes,
and vanishes into a silence
that says nothing
that says everything.
Peace swells.
Calmness.
No words.
Time goes past
and breaks into a deep and soundless rhythm.
Life is no longer empty,
it is full.
Time is content. Time is eternal.

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The river

The ceaseless flow of a river
carries me past unending fields
of daffodils and lavender,
where, in welcoming darkness,
the healing touch of an inward light
removes all memory of earth and air.

It is beyond my powers to change
the rippling glide through all-consuming night,
the darkness that sees and hears nothing
yet holds within it, all my secrets,
my tragedies, and my triumphs,
and raises me above them all in tranquility
and an endless flow of forgetfulness and comfort.

The past is strange and distant now,
and even the present and future are borne away
with a fragrant rose that unfurls its petals
in a tide that knows no time or space, but murmurs
in unfathomable quiet, a sound
I’ve never heard before and may never hear again.

For I cannot predict the moments
of devouring happiness, the moments
which come and go in the glistening threads
of the river as it rolls through
fields of daffodils and lilies and
embraces them all in its waters.