Take My Hand

Please don’t plant me
neat rows of rosebushes
and tulips at attention,
no manicured gardens
or crystal vases of cut stems.

Instead, take my hand,
lead me onto
rain-softened grass
which undulates like a boat
on a summer lake,

lie down with me
in a quilt of sunlight and shadows
among yellow petals, violet trumpets,
a feast for hares and bees,
let’s linger and forget ourselves

until even the tiled sky above
is cracked open by stars
and all that is restless and wild
within us can roam the heavens
howling the moon aloft.

Christine Valters Paintner is an American poet and writer living in Galway, Ireland. She is the author of eleven books of nonfiction on creative process and contemplative practice, and her poems have been published in The Galway Review, Boyne Berries, HeadStuff, Skylight 47, Spiritus, Tiferet Journal, Anchor, Presence, Crannóg, ARTS, U.S. Catholic, and North West Words. Her first collection of poems, Dreaming of Stones, will be published by Paraclete Press in 2019. You can find more of her writing and poetry at Abbey of the Arts.