Sunday morning
time for sabbath sacraments.

He steps out into a gusty wind,
some fat splattering sweeps of raindrops
falling across his porch roof
on down through the roaring river valley,
forcing, then ebbing
storm of February wind with rain,
a wondrous primal pair,
he adores.

The birds have started liturgical dance
and songs of ritual and regeneration
without him.
Already flying up in quick dives of floating play
with speaking time,
singing back to Brother Wind
howling on his way.

Calling, chanting cantors, conjoining
swelling sacred song of anti-gravity
for co-arising blissful sweeps of sound,
karmic atmosphere swirling time-rich
sacred rites across his house-bound skin.

Sound of incense sweeps down his river,
north to south with warmer hopes and economic intentions,
reminding it was his time for political baptism.

She incanted from the bathtub
in short gusts of warm blast enculturation,
joining his internal gospel choir,
chirping her oppositional descant
challenging and prophesying and occupying
in full-voiced roar of need
as want
right now,
and seldom bothering a please,
much less a thanks
for caring as best he could
to hear her oppostional rhythms and patterns,
irritating flows of hard-blown breath
with attitude.

Storming and brewing
birds cheering rage in her brain
shouting at co-arising gravity
to blow another way
with her exegetical universe,
her way,
the only way
she can imagine
to function in a reverse and upside down
political world of unheard powerlessness
when inside
she can only find her loud-voiced demands
to turn life around,
spin this slippery wind of Earth
to blow in her right liturgical way.

Baptism completes this wind drenched requiem
of full-life as anti-death survival
to cooperate this week’s regenerate vocational intent
and ecopolitical practice.

She joins her dad
for one last look
through jaundiced eye
at drenching rain that could fly back
from whence it came
if only wiser timed to start this day.

Birds now pray their benedictions
quietly in wind-protected nests
while he listens to swollen postlude protest
against co-gravitating time,
uprooting old rooted systems
decayed for newer octave use
as compost fading into swaying trees
waving back to join upriver’s grace of windblown time,
and forth to rejoin downriver’s centering roots
through February’s purging Earth
decomposing dance.

He closes his door to time’s external grace
to watch a smile warmly cross her chronic face
like a gust of refreshing wind
through a rainy karmic life.