Epiphany Madrigal

Written by Lisa Russ Spaar, Horace W. Goldsmith Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Creative Writing Program, Dept. of English, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Epiphany Madrigal

for Sydney Hall Blair

What’s a gift if not the heart’s envoi,
a cut, a wrap, a species of we’re done
here, it’s over, concluded, kaput—fiction’s ploy.
In trow:  no end to things, to things undone,

en-voy, in via, on the way
is what we always are, even those
with bodies blazed to ash gray as this new day,
a little red touching hills, roofs

of houses where strangers live.
The boxwood on the mantle brittles.
Yet they travel, the kings with what they have to give,
which, all things granted, is a gracious little,

just the truth of trust & move & wend,
for which, despite the rhyme, there is no end.

© Lisa Russ Spaar