Delighting

Christ delighted in flowers.
--Bernard of Clairvaux, "On Loving God"

And God, eternal love from age to age,
said, “I will love what cannot last,
what is not of my being
but longs for it.  Their longing I assuage,
as to myself I bring
the ones who fall to storm wind’s blast
and time,” and made the lily and the sage.

They could not help but blossom in his love
and fade as quickly as they bloomed
to vanish from the earth,
yet when their maker left his seat above
he chose the lily’s birth:
to bud, unfold, and then be doomed
with all the flowers he’d had the making of.

For by their nature they could not remain—
these somethings made from nothing fall,
returning to the dust
and leaving nothing, not even a stain,
an ash, a fleck of rust—
yet when they live, he lives in all,
and when they die he knows their dying pain.

But he who made the seasons made the spring;
who made the stars made all the hours
and each new-mercied day,
and though we drop like petals withering
he knows our swift decay.
Christ so delighted in the flowers
he fades with us, although he is our king.

And so with him we fall and we return.
We languish with a passing breath,
as wind in autumn sighs,
yet he is curled within, a sleeping fern
and spring that never dies,
that we may blossom after death
delighting in him, too, for whom we yearn.

Rosa centifolia (cabbage rose) By Pierre-Joseph Redouté - www.herbarium.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=859013