To Hold Everything

I think of all that is happening elsewhere,
as I lie here.
Nearby, I can hear the sounds of a road crew.
Somewhere else, monkeys chatter in the trees.
A male seahorse becomes pregnant.
A diamond forms,
a bee dances out directions,
a windshield shatters.
Somewhere a mother spreads peanut butter
for her son’s lunch,
a lover sighs,
a knitter binds of the edge of a sleeve.
Clouds gather to make rain,
corn ripens on the stalk,
a cancer cell divides,
a little league team scores.
Somewhere blossoms open,
a man pushes a knife in deeper,
a painter darkens her blue.
A cashier pours new dimes
into an outstretched hand,
rainbows form and fade,
plates in the earth shift and settle.
A woman opens a velvet box,
male spiders pluck gently on the females’ webs,
falcons fall from the sky.
Abstracts are real
and time is a lie,
it cannot be measured
when one moment can expand to hold everything.
You can want to live
and end up choosing death;
and you can want to die and end up living.
What keeps us here, really?
A thread that breaks in a breeze.
And yet a thread that cannot be broken.

~ Elizabeth Berg, Never Change