By Brian Hill
The air was clear away to inland
where the shallow mountains settled
beyond woodlands I called my own
as if the earth was reaching up,
as we might reach up to heaven
and the fractious gods we worship there.
But the earth is old enough
and wise enough
to know that airless space between the worlds
through which the light it needs must fall
is only airless space.
If we understood this of heaven,
we would know the heaven we look to
is not an imagined paradise above our heads
and we might see what is already at our feet:
soil and surfaces, the green stem growing,
wilderness, shadow and light in patterns
only half discerned.
Paradise is in the world around us,
in every grain, in every atom,
in the madness of weather
and the calm of every storm abated,
here, in the animal rush,
here, in the spiralling growth
and we are alive with it.
It is alive with us.