Not-Yet

Gabriele Münter

Not-Yet

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch –
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

Jane Hirshfield

This theme keeps coming up. I don’t know if I’m making that happen, or if there’s just a lot of poems out there about this and I’ve just happened upon a glut of them? ("What if This Road, by Sheenagh Pugh, "Otherwise", by Jane Kenyon, "Sometimes", by Sheenagh Pugh looks at it from the positive side, and there might even be more, further back in blog-time.) It's something I want to hear over and over anyway. I want equilibrium. It's balance I'm looking for. Something between being thankful for what is, knowing it could be 'otherwise', knowing things can and will change, like in "What if This Road", and that those changes will increase in difficulty, but also seeing this as a challenge and an opportunity for good things - as Sheenagh Pugh does in "Sometimes".  I love the back-and-forth between all these poems. But there's something not being said - a poem I'll need to add. What is my reason for feeling hope, for knowing good will come? After all, this is not a tightrope I walk, it's a thread I follow. Not the god of Not-Yet, but the I Am, the I Never Change, and I Make All Things New.