On the Loss of a Favorite Bowl

No one knows when they will meet a traveling mercy.

They arrive in the hands of travelers,

sometimes lovers,

sometimes no one is there at all, it seems.

They take such odd

and infinitely differing forms:

a bowl,

a piece of brown glass,

a long black dress forsaken, but not forgotten,

a collection of stones brought together

on summery early evenings

filled with grandmother smiles and cicada songs.

Not everyone realizes

when they are in the presence of,

or in possession of,

a mercy.

Flown in from the outer reachs of the universe

across a billion trillion miles to the hands of strangers, and sometimes lovers,

reaching out to us

in the plain and simple act of compassion,

of understanding,

of seeing the real you under and between all those layers.

They are hardly ever anything but ordinary,

for, in the rest of the universe,

mercy is the norm.

We here on earth are still works in progress and tend to ignore the ordinary.

Which is why we sometimes lose our mercies.

Everyone realizes when a mercy is lost,

no one ever loses one without a long and serious stretch of tears and grief.

We weep,

we cry,

we shake in mourning for the lost love,

the lost time,

the lost vision of ourselves as something true

that was somehow contained in that little ordinary thing.

Then we go on as if something has been left behind,

but, if we know true mercy

down deep we know

that the power was never part

of the stones

or the glass

or the dress

or the bowl.

It was in the hearts and souls and memories of those who brought it to us

and those never leave us.

Never.

Out there in the universe beyond,

they fly circles waiting to zoom down to us,

just as we stumble,

just as we fall,

just as the words of hate strike us,

just as the doctor finishes his speech about cyto something or other,

just as we think the first thoughts about never finding love,

just as we think we are finished -

--they arrive.

You can hardly feel them,

they enter open eyes and open hearts and open minds

and take the form

of stones in a box,

or a long black dresses

or something as plain as a piece of brown glass.

All you can tell is the daylight seems sharper,

more in tune with the moment,

and so do you.