Balm in Gilead

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries dour Jeremiah in granite tones. “There is a balm in Gilead,” replies a Negro spiritual. The baritone who chants it, leaning forward on the platform, looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm that rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises. Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies, their breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms, opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass, and printed on the sky in zigzag lines, watch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides of a California condor, once thought doomed, now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.