And We Frolicked

And We Frolicked

(“Prophesy to the breath. Prophesy, son of man. Tell the breath, ‘God, the Master, says, Come from the four winds. Come, breath. Breathe on these slain bodies. Breathe life!’” Ezekiel 37:9)

It was a strong wind that lifted the crossword images
from the river to the sightlines from the shore.
We were scratching
jigsaw puzzles we bought for Christmas.
The sonic booms tried their hand at prophesying
new faces of the moon. All they ended up doing
was scaring the dogs huddled underneath the tables
in the living room.
There was an exhalation that warmed the journey
we expected to run in the morning mist. We were
dead on our feet,
deceased upon the heels of our discontent.
We ceased moving and wallowed in the mud
while waiting for the wind to come our way again.

We had been looking for our necessary mood when our time
finally ran out. We were dry as corpses, broken like
long-held fantasies of winning back our losses. That
was the day breathing and the sun turned to sand.

But there was movement in the air, we could feel it
though we could not hear it. There were wild geese
honking up the sky in their v-shaped migration. And the
wind stirred between us, lifting us lightly above ourselves,
entering ourselves, unwrapping ourselves, reviving our
selves in ways we had wished for so long. We missed the
ways things once were when the trees caught the breeze
in their branches and shared it with the forest floor.

The wild geese stirred the wind again and like a burst
of unbounded joy we opened anew to as breath
entered us, centered us, reoriented us; we saw anew and
thanked the spirit. We heard anew and knew the tune. We spoke
too soon, so we quietly listened as our skin felt the touch of
wildness we had been pursuing for years. In our stillness
it caught up with us, and we frolicked like we had been
born again.