How many souls have you held thus

cupped in the hollow of your hand?

How many brows have you touched 

thus

giving a blessing to something mightily asleep?

Why is it so hard to give meaning to complex gestures

and yet a world hangs in the balance of 

a palm

stroking your cheek?

Lovely wonders are nearly always empty at the 

bottom.

It's the plain ones, the vastness of a 

monochromatic sky against a quietly rippling

ocean of sea-colored grass,

that grab your heart and rip at it so fiercely

that in the end it kills.

But a soft and solemn death it is,

this dying in the middle of momentous peace.