What is keeping you afloat?

tell me

Another Sacred Hour
--with a line from Martin Luther King Jr.

What is keeping you afloat right now?
Is it a vaguely mauve sky at dawn,

the nebulous serenity of moonmist
and morning fog? Maybe it’s a mountain 

seep, newly green with Christmas 
fern or moss on the trunk of 

a chestnut oak. There comes a time 
when the cup of endurance runs over,

and you will know despair like 
a meadow vole knows hawk-screech 

and ground-sweeping shadows, 
but joy will find its way back 

in wind-drifts of bee-bent lavender
and brassy notes from a wood thrush,

another sacred hour to empty your cup.

New York ferns and a moss-coated chestnut oak at Baker's Mountain, NC