For the one day in April we humans set aside

to honour our Mother the Earth

(as though we might forget her

for the other 364 days of the year,)

I open the music box of poems I save.

seeking from some gifted poet, words worthy of her.

I scan, set aside, lamentations expressing our grief,

our innumerable failures to honour and love the source of our life.

I choose instead a poem by Alfred LaMotte

for its celebration of all that she is:

Our Mother

who art in Gaia,

brown as loam, nameless as rain,

may your presence be a golden void,

the absence of the search.

Let your family dwell here as a circle,

not a kingdom,

where spirit and body, heaven and earth

mingle and small sacraments

of compost and compassion.

Be the breath we take,

the breath we make each day

with her own wrinkled hands.

Let our prayer’s word be “Enough.”

For you are the weaver of galaxies

into nests for young planets,

and using the whole sky in a robin’s egg.

In you we are always home.

Dissolve the veil of judgment,

dispel our illusions of impurity,

so that we may immerse one another

in your bodily fluids

of abounding goodness.

For thine is the roundness,

and the brokenness

and the healing.

Amen

Alfred LaMotte