About suffering, I’ve mostly been wrong,
about belief, about the noise of bells cleaving
the dark eye of fevered mornings, given to high-flown
ideals, to just fictions, I’d known the mind has its own
instinct for mercy, as those bare trees lashed, most
altered, by wind had seemed to me newly alive—or more so
than in their stillness—not pausing then to question why,
as if that reckless surge were the meaning of living, to be
turned, acted upon by forces unseen. As once
in the vaulted heights of a cathedral I saw a sparrow
veer from window to wood to stone, not yielding
to the final word, crossing the expanse, not knowing how yet,
a zenith, the boughs ruined by waiting.