This is how we
celebrate holi-days,
I found.
Baking sugar cookies
in festive shapes,
foods that comfort,
spirits and laughs.
But the sun rises and cries
for a different kind of sweetness
and fullness on these days.
To forgo righteous and
judgement and right-way thinking.
To look for the light of the fire
of those without homes,
to stand in a house of wor-ship
and declare that love is love,
to walk along a border-line
and to feel what should be–
health, safety and promise for all.
The stars shine on the evenings
of holi-days,
the moon still hangs, sadly,
but brightly for the lonely,
and in the dark spaces in the
sky where there is nothingness,
there is room to imagine what
these days can be for–
a present wrapped in hope
for the most vulnerable among
us, the dreamers, the defeated,
songs for those lost and found in stigma,
merriment for the heart.
Before those sugar cookies burn,
I open the oven, take them out,
and see what they really mean to-day.
Diana Poulos
Lutz
