breath

It's like breath:
have you ever thought about it?
Have you emptied your lungs
and filled them again,
focusing your mind
on the right amount of oxygen,
the right length of a breath,
the right dispersal of carbon dioxide.
Have you told the cells
to open and absorb
the life that hangs in the very air
we walk through,
and do you marvel
at this unconscious system?
I am awakened to the wonder
of how it keeps happening,
even when I am done marveling.

This is my breath: 
A peach sky and
cicada's song which fills the quiet spaces.
The way my kids love each other
between the bickering.
The way new words
formed by a careful, callow tongue
sound in my toddler's sticky-sweet voice.
Pulling cabbages from the garden
(the ones the rabbit didn't munch)
and with it, making a dish
to fill my family's belly.
The dusk hours and whip-poor-will's call
when the world is painted that ethereal blue
and the ground is cooled by
shadows like a blanket
pulled up under the chin of a sleepy sun.
Mint tea with honey, too late at night.
My babies' flower-stem arms
around my neck:
how the littlest give the biggest love.

I cling to these moments!
They
are my breath.
And in this same way
in which I do not
think about breathing -
it simply happens.
It is simply there.
And then
I am made aware,
and I marvel at how it works,
how it keeps me alive.