Risk to Allow

We allow the blade of dawn beneath the fingernail of night,

though every sunrise is an incision,

a bright wound opening the sealed skin of certainty.

We allow fire into our homes and call it hearth,

a tame sun crouched between bricks,

licking its orange tongue across winter's throat.

Like a beekeeper lifting a veil into a storm of wings,

we offer our bare faces to futures that hum and sting.

We bury seeds in the dark throat of earth,

trusting that what looks like disappearance may return wearing leaves.

Each night we allow sleep,

that small surrender dressed as necessity.

We trust darkness enough to lay our pulse beside it.

A diver steps backward from the boat,

giving permission to gravity before water.

A deer steps onto a frozen river,

elegant,

uncertain,

one crack away from revelation.

We allow glaciers to calve inside the heart,

great blue cathedrals collapsing into unknown seas.

The pearl is an irritation perfected.

Certain seeds wait for fire before awakening.

Volcanoes erase landscapes and manufacture islands.

The world seems fond of rewards hidden inside alarms.

So we allow love to strike flint against bone.

We allow grief to arrive disguised as devotion,

a wolf wrapped in the warm hide of attachment.

We allow children to become distances.

We allow tomorrow,

that magnificent rumor.

We allow dreams to walk blindfolded across bridges woven from fog and hearsay. And sometimes,

at the cliff-face of afternoon,

watching one’s teenage son search the stone for an improbable hold beyond reach, an adult hand is raised signaling the okay sign,

allowing the lateral dyno, a leap of fingers, faith, and empty air,

the kind of move some might call reckless until belief discovers it has already found a place to land.

To invite tomorrow’s risks of faith is to feel life is there to allow and discover.