Surviving-A Poem by Chuck Miller

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

Winter is hanging on UP here. When I got up this morning, it was 7 degrees F. Now it’s down to 6. And Opening Day less than a week away! I’m tired of winter, but… it seems to me that this poem by Chuck Miller, on page 312 of “GOOD POEMS, Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor, As heard on The Writer’s Almanac” speaks especially to those of us who still have some winter to live…

in celebration of surviving

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you’re getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won’t get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart’s trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you’re warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

JRMcF

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