“Don’t take or make a photograph,”
the instructor says. “Receive it.”
I am thinking about gifts,
how we have to be taught to see them,
these rocks under our bare feet,
gifts of the earth to ground us.
We have to be taught to understand
that readiness, yours and mine, is all,
taught to accept the gift, to open
as the flower to the blessed bee,
to let the gift bring forth our gifts,
as the kind wife folded her endless linen cloth,
her kind husband counting his everlasting coins.
We have to be taught to say thanks
and mean it, taught to praise
with our voices and eyes and souls
the rich offering that is life,
that is the world of wild geese calling,
the world that offers itself to our imaginations,
as the rising light fingers the dune,
wakens the water.
We have only to raise our faces,
stretch out our hands.
Libby Falk Jones, Berea, KY