Vox Populi
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Carolyn Miller: Rapture
When they said the world was coming to an end, I thought about my brother, his long limbs, his good shoulders and thick hair, his small white teeth, his beautiful feet at the end of the hospital bed. How he lies now, hazel eyes closed, in a metal coffin embossed with dogwood blossoms. They said the true believers would be taken up; first my brother in his dark blue suit and all the other dead in Christ, then the living, would ascend to meet Jesus in the air. But I remembered how my brother and I already had been raptured, how each year we were caught up in spring, reborn again as the flowers were reborn: first the hawthorn and wild plum, pale glimmerings among the leafless trees, then the violets and honeysuckle, the redbud and the dogwood, those thick, creamy cross-shaped flowers pierced and rusted on the edges, held in rafts of bloom all through the woods, until we were transformed, taken up into the bodies of the flowers, even as we stood, unmoving, on a rocky hill.
Copyright 2017 Carolyn Miller. From Route 66 and Its Sorrows (Terrapin Books, 2017).
Carolyn Miller grew up in the Missouri Ozarks. Today she lives in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a free-lance copy editor.
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A quietly marvelous poem. Thanks for it.
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Thanks, Lex. I agree!
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“But I remembered how my brother and I
already had been raptured,
how each year we were caught up
in spring, reborn again as the flowers
were reborn”–What a beautiful poem 💖
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Yes, it is. I love Carolyn’s poems.
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I, too, love Carolyn’s poems — they have a tone and cadence all of their own…
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Beautiful description of renewal and rebirth
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Yes, it is beautiful. I’m very moved by this poem.
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So rapturous and fine for these days of Lent!
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Yes, I love Carolyn’s poems. She dips so easily into the spriritual.
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