Dear Spirit that hides in the kitchen cupboard,
inhabits the soup pot, clatters among the unwashed
dishes, you are the air that dries my sheets
on the clothesline, the mist that moistens
the clematis vine climbing the garden fence,
the breath on the back of my neck,
the squeak on the attic stairs.

I bend my knee to the steady drone
of your demands, to the way bone and body
move through a day, the promise of morning
and resignation of evening. Where you abide
is my cathedral, smudged windows
my stained glass, vacuum cleaner humming
a hymn, my children’s faces an open prayer book,

our lives a sacrament we celebrate each holy day—
baptism, marriage, death, the small
rituals of becoming and being,
sunflower into seed for winter birds,
grass into hay, all that grows flowering
and seeding, dying into rising, new vine, new leaf.