Homemade elderberries

Are the best kind

Trust the elders who challenge the worried

Who question the juice of manufactured berries

Squashed like bugs

And tagged unrelenting

We can hardly lose to the ignorant

Coughs are the rugged cries of the resistance

Temperatures rise inflated by insistence

This is not a time for blind obedience

This is a time for ripened romance

The lure of the anarchist

Not so frightening in a handshake

Among the resistance

This is the time for brave berry picking

Noting the ripe and the bruised from living

Gathering for the inevitable 

The common great listening

It will come slowly free of insistence

When the hearts and the minds 

Coalesce in an earthquake

The planet gives up its right to tsunami

When the people wake up

When they are armed with

The love of themselves who speak with disarming

Of peace and enclosure

Respect and the disposal of war

Plant an elderberry or ten

Become human again.

Stop coughing. Note the scars

Bring nothing but change.

Pick elderberries and be brave again.

Be ready for the strange.

Go forth and bleed. Again and again.

It’s a star we possess in the end.

3.13.20

Photo: nyc UES 12.2.24