This is a good one for spring and for remembering we weren’t meant to work until we die.
Giving Notice
by Joy Sullivan
One day soon, you’ll rise from your desk or quietly excuse yourself
from the meeting or turn the car around in the middle of the street.
Anything might trigger it. An open window. A sunny day in April.
Daffodils panting in a mason jar. Call it madness. Call it glorious
disappearance. Call it locomotion. Do what you should have done
years ago. Let your body out to pasture. Fill your calendar with nothing
but sky. Surrender to the woods. To cicadas and sap beetles. To the moths,
the color of memory and dream. Wear dusk like an ancient cloak. Hurry—
there’s still time to creature—to pluck all the wild cloudberries and carry
them home. Even now, you can hear coyotes crying at the canyon’s edge.
Grow back your hackles and howl. This was always your first chorus,
the mother tongue, a feral hymn you know by heart.