You can’t walk away.
You can’t choose
not to be blessed

The blessing goes with you,
persistent as a taunt —
you may think you want to walk away
but you can’t

You can turn your back
on a thousand years,
on hundreds of your deaths,
you can focus in on countless framings
of the old story

You can wave your arms
and shut your eyes,
you can plug your ears and shout
(as you’ve been doing all this time)

But when you stop
you will feel the blessing
approaching as if from afar
like sunrise
where you realize
after a while
that the light’s been with you
all the time you were waiting for it
and you haven’t been shrouded
nor yet exempted:
the blessing has been here all along.

©Wendy Mulhern
November 14, 2016