My daughter-in-law, Kelly Herbert, with all her gifts and talents, joined our family in 2015.  Recently she shared 2 poems with me, one of which I will share now.  Both Kelly and our son, Tim, have an eye for beauty and a love for the earth.  They understand stewardship and their involvement  with stewarding the wondrous place they live and that we all share.  I absolutely love some of the phrases she uses.

All Things Big and Small
by Kelly Herbert

Have you ever stood next to a tree
Squinting up at its shimmering leaves,
Contrasted against the brilliant blue sky,
And thought about how this massive trunk of carbon sprouted out from a tiny seed?
A double helix,
A minute message of instruction,
Invisible to the eye,
Orchestrated the intrinsic dance of energy and nutrients that the seed did not have to practice to perform perfectly.
The seedling sucked up nutrients out of the earth and air,
Reached and reached and reached,
Collecting rays and rain drops until it was a giant vertical log tickling the clouds,
Its branches leaning over you now.  

Have you ever looked down at the mosaic of mosses beneath your feet?
Little green fairy sized ferns,
Terrestrial sponges of bluish green
that bounce back
Others, fragile, crumble with a touch
Even smaller and more complex yet,
Are the little critters trekking singular granules of sand up out of their intricate home of tunnels.
Do they even know I am here?
I do not think of them except now.
This world is so big and small.

I’ve called and cried
hoping You would listen,
Spread my arms and
waited for you to answer.

Where is grace?
I feel lost and out of place.

Oh so slowly
As I’ve given up
you have found a way
to pull me close.

Where is grace?
I feel lost but have a taste

My heart you’ve changed,
so I won’t grasp
for what I long,
to what is gone.

For where is grace
when I feel lost and out of place?

In that taste.

The autumn colors flown from the trees
assaulted by the frigid  breeze
though we were
sheltered in the lea.
As an eagle soared high
in the clear cerulean sky
we lay my father
gently in the ground.
In the sweet earth
on  which he had toiled
for so long.

He was our father
he was our friend,
and with our tears
sprinkled in the golden grass,
we lay the quiet words
and sparkling  eyes’
the laughing voice
and gentle hands,
we lay the heart
that loves us still
gently in the ground.

My father, probably the kindest man I ever met, died on November 13, 2017 at the age of almost 98.  His funeral was held just over a week later, on a clear cold day.  1 Corinthians 13 says that “love never ceases” and I believe that.  He was a good father.   I miss him.

The page was known…
   read and reread,
   underlined, annotated
   illuminated…
   …reread again.
then ribbon lifted
   and hollow formed beneath the page,
a cave of sorts, with life inside.

Slowly the hollow became sky
as the page lifted clear
   and floated
   …to gently settle next
   to what had been.
Ready now to be read
   were these new words
   to this old story,
…enter now, they called to me.

The first not forgotten
…nor unimportant,
but leading the way,
for what is now.
This character that I have entered,
coauthored with a Greater.
These new, fresh words,
shimmer and wait,
as though by my living
…will they be fixed to the page.

A week ago I had an opportunity to retreat.  This is my way of mining and remembering the gift of the weekend.

I stand before this massive tree
waiting for the green to red
…and the red to fall
     …slowly…
leaf…by…leaf

I sit beneath it’s canopy
before it empties
…and lays to bed
its summer’s work