Sometimes it seems the entire focus of people’s lives
is to gaze heavenward on some eternal bliss,
and hope to climb closer with every step,
only to slide back down as human error clips them,
foolishly forgetting Heaven reaches down.
But I promise you, as certain as I able,
into our most wretched of abysses,
both through the beautiful moments Nature provides
and in the agonies we turn towards and shoulder,
you will see Heaven reaches down.
How can I look at a sunrise arrayed in golden radiance,
the spun crimson threads of cloud across a lake,
mirrored so there is no division ‘twixt earth and sky,
and think any differently of it?
A little reminder Heaven reaches down.
Or, confronted by a suffering, opening my heart like a door,
I realize that the grace on the other side
is the only true healing for it,
the only path out of the shadowed valley
where Heaven reaches down.
It looks at me through careworn faces of people I love
and those who have loved me, whether parted or alongside,
but also peeks from the eyes of those I do not know,
yet hurt in ways I know how to balm, which makes them no strangers.
In them, Heaven reaches down.
You see, when I fix my thoughts on perfected bliss,
my hands do not serve, my words are corroded copper,
for I am needed here, not there, and useful as slag
until I tell myself to turn my eyes earthward,
and remember Heaven reaches down.
The wise man cautions against the material things,
and perhaps the wounds I bind are immaterial
in the grandest sense of what all this means,
but they are real, and I know with every mended stitch
Heaven reaches down.
I find it looking in eyes that won’t meet mine,
I find it in painful places I strain to reach,
and I know it is there when their fingers clutch mine,
just as mine have clutched theirs in similar straits:
Heaven reaches down.
