Change Your Plans




Change Your Plans



More often
those moments
                when roads of light and storm
                open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                                God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
                                                                                Annunciation
                                                                                Denise Levertov


The way they made everything
so it would last almost as long
as God, and easily recovered
when it did break down (because
who are we fooling) through all
the natural barriers of age

and decay, they took up
their needles and their picks
and their quiet sledge hammers
and struck the heavy beasts
between the eyes so that all
they saw was a bright and

painless light, so the fracture
went straight into them the way
a plow blade cleaves the spring
garden after all the winter's heavy
snow and rain—and they go down
trembling to their knees and see
up into the face of their deliverer

and maybe there’s time for grace,
a flash after the shot up flare
and from their isolation the ex-
plodding lets everyone know
where they are and that something
marvelous has just happened: see
we too are broke open,

to receive, to agree and agree,
she said it, you must change
your life, look whose laid it down
for you, take off your shoes and go
like the bull, look up, it’s time to pray
and then, get up, get up off
your fucking knees and live.

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