When one undergoes a change
from one form to another, whether struck
at once by blinding light and just as quickly
the sudden dark or having been immersed
in the liquid light of a love made manifest
for eons and only now having realized
the solution everywhere all at once
after so long a dissolution...

This conversion is a shaking loose
of all that had seemed so right and true .
Lesser versions, per your former self's belief,
are seen in the light of day as a horror.
You grieve all the diversions and dichotomies,
divisions of your soul and see it clearly now,
how the inversion seemed mere oversight,
the transposition of two tiny letters in a word.

What once appeared to be subversion—
a thing to be stopped at all costs, cut off 
at the head, called out and dressed up,
whether with some scarlet letter or a gold star,
marked as an infidel or made into an object lesson
in some grown-up show and tell while playing
self-appointed defender, clansman of the clean-up crew;
these same people, places, things, now seen
in a different light and having undergone 
some strange reversion,

And become a stark reminder of the necessary
reliance on a work of grace and that grace,
at times, a terror that if not tended to becomes a thorn,
that if not acknowledged and honored lodges
deep in the soul and then makes a gash 
through which we fall in time—
the dream, yours and mine, lost 
and so great a cost to so many.

So despite the moment of conversion
there is no sweet surprise, some moment of salvation
at which one world is switched for another.
There is no escaping who and what we were,
and all of us have one thorn or another.
And yet, for the one who dares the journey on,
leading with the heart's conviction, resting in
the grace of a terrible reckoning without seeking

To control—for this one there is so great a gift
of transformation that the world might shift upon its axis
and still the Love can no more be taken from you
than the truth of what remains can be shaken in me.
This, then, is the Law: mystery, work of grace that is
a mercy, an all-consuming fire that sets all things
spinning and finds in bittersweet endings
fought against so long a new beginning
this world has yet to see and, too,
the reclamation of a dream:

a white rose that blooms
and rises from the grave.