Red Bird

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

So every day

I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth

of the ideas of God,one of which was you.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that

and the years before that

you were not.