Does your son know God? they ask, meaning
has he bowed before a mahogany mourner’s bench in a
Baptist church in east Tennessee?  Did he recite
the right words with the right heart-attitude, do you think 
he knows how wretched he really is?
I don’t know, I tell them, I only know this—

I’ve tried to show him the time it takes
to taste a peach, to stand inside the softness of thistle like a
thank you, to find in a fallow field all there is to know, 
that in our world the ordinary is the miracle, a cold creek 
or fall flame, whether shrieking crow or weeping willow, this is love—
and in this love its own kind of knowing.