Daffodils, Tulips, and Bricks

                The Positive Way

              Yesterday I planted the daffodils before the frost

                so they might know themselves while dreaming in the earth

                and do what daffodils are meant to do when they bloom 

                beneath the benevolent spring sun in defiance of winter’s

                icy grip.  And when they wake from their winter dreaming

                they paint the greening world of spring with splendor.  

                Today I power-washed the bricks, dull things of clay

                to do what bricks are meant to do as they quietly labor

                brick by brick in the building up of human shelters

                one brick at a time in bonded trust with other bricks 

                to build those fortress walls where human enterprise

                conspires to make us different from the Neanderthals.

                Tomorrow I will plant the tulip bulbs before the frost

                harbingers of the long-awaited spring.  Their dirt-encrusted

                roots and broken stems rested for a time in a sheltered box

                exhausted and pitiable things; their shriveled tendrils

                robbed of vigor as they patiently waited through the long hot

                summer for the cool and redemptive touch of mother earth.

                Yesterday.  Today.  And Tomorrow…. 

                 perhaps time is not really Time after all

                 perhaps Time is an ever-expanding and eternal – now

                 where daffodils and bricks and tulip bulbs conspire

                 to postulate and mirror the expanding universe

                 in the very ordinariness of their cellular being.