Prettier Than Heaven
Digital #002
Contributors: John Schengber, TJ Rinoski
(Good headphones recommended.) It's early summer in Virginia. You are sitting at a glass table on a screened-in porch and the season's first big storm is arriving. You are listening to the wind blow sheets of rain against the porch and the surrounding trees; and the thunder soon joins you in applause. You sit there, listening, for almost an hour, as the storm moves across the state. After a while, the thunder grows distant, and the birds come back. If you listen closely, you can hear the streams bulging with enthusiasm on their way to the Bay.
Prettier Than Heaven
It’s prettier than heaven here
When I notice the dancing birds
When spring has come and the sun is waiting
I will take every moment I can get
To come out of abstraction.
To think, if I do anything.
I think: I will do everything.
I feel and will feel and more than
Trust in the summer to save me.
As the birds and flowers have tried to tell us
In their songs:
You, me, we—
Aren’t we a bit alike?
Alive and brave
Not a thing we do goes unnoticed
Unfelt
All ripples are waves
And that is why we run so fast
Into the ocean.