Poetry

Yellow Trail at Laurelville on Rapture Day

I could sit down on this rock, partway up the hill. No time
for the overlook, much less Split Rock. A good day
for caterpillars and new greenery, mushrooms and

puddles just starting to shrink. All this rain, yet one day
we will pray for more. Some say the Rapture is hours away,
but there's no sign yet. It would be some kind of change.

I'm expecting something besides bodies sailing up into
the void, something more like the way new shoots
of mayapple and poison ivy appear out of the muck,

or spring warblers call invisibly from 10:00 high.
Sometimes a leafy branch will wave and beckon
through a window in the trees, then go still. Years ago

I walked up this hill at dawn, sweating with the climb
as I did today, and in the meadow at the top I walked up
on a flock of wild turkeys, as if they'd been waiting for me.