the deepening ground

Times like this call for perspective. The following poem written back in 2017 inspired by a reverie with the desktop wallpaper on my iMac came back to mind this morning as I listened to different perspectives on these days, days brimming with fear, distancing, and uncertainty. When all the noise around me grows so loud and my eyes hunger for eternal things, I’m grateful for our kitchen window vista of Wolf Creek, a female cardinal infatuated with my Ford E-350’s driver-side window (despite the poop decorating my door), and the sound of my children laughing over a game of Dominion.

Perspective

vincent h. anastasi (2017)

I need these sights,
these boundless vistas:

      sprawling canyons
      layered warm muted tones
      stretching beyond horizon
      like primeval ruins;

      undulating oceans 
      melding sea and sky
      ablaze with sun cresting waves;

      billowing clouds
      prodigious in their slow transfigurations
      wandering the heavens;

      towering sequoias,
      fluted rusty red columns,
      monuments of the distant past,
      millennia recorded in irregular rings—

these bring perspective,
let me feel the proper size of my self,
remind me how small
I really am.
I lose the vaunting I
and drown the bulbous ego.

And yet
the One
      who carved canyons, superimposing sunsets,
      who poured oceans from cupped palms,
      who exhaled clouds like majestic pipe smoke,
      who planted sequoias with a spoken word,
He is moved
by this quintessence of dust
as I am moved
by the Red-Shouldered Hawks
surveying my backyard,
thrilled by their calls,
hoping they come closer
or simply meet my admiring gaze.