Gratitude

…The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
– T.S. Eliot, “Preludes”

I will be late for work:
the traffic tells me so,
and Adam's curse run deep in roads
too busy to know their name.

Beaten by roadside lies the debris
and dust of abandoned schedules: here 
someone burst a tyre, there
a jerry-can was left, there some refuse
of a long-forgotten breakfast.

Why do wild flowers speak
in pitches more alive to me?
Pointed, they dance in the breeze: 
small, white-purple flecks of something else,
another time, another Where. 

Yet life is lived on roads,
and time is stretched in tyre-marks 
to places where we'd rather be. 
Wake up. Gratitude's an act of grace
and this day is thick with its potential.

Nothing's lived except when it harkens
to all that defies it,
and all that belies it.
If the day begins thus, then let it, and listen:
this is where you must now be.