Lent. Again.

Still humming a clinging scrap of Christmas,

still squinting through the bright winter light 

bouncing off the shining gifts of Epiphany,

suddenly the wind shifts and you get a face full of

Ashes. Deep sighs and ashes and those somber words

no one likes to say or hear, those words that make you 

think of all those friends and relatives who

were swallowed by history far, far too suddenly 

and too soon,

those words that taunt you, making you wonder 

if the 25-year warranty on your new gizmo or thingamabob

is just so much paper irony 

or a chuckle from heaven.

Remember that you are dust. 

Ashes and dust. And let me just mark it here

on your forehead so you don’t forget, right here

where all the world will see it and

the well-meaning busybodies in the grocery store

will awkwardly try to do you the favor 

of letting you know that there is 

a crossing smudge of mortality on your face.

Lent. Again.

Forty days, not counting Sundays, 

of wondering about wandering 

in deserts of every kind,

of negotiating multi-level interchanges from one 

high road to another,

inching along on thoroughfares

that never allow their advertised speed,

forty days to be mindful of inattentiveness,

forty days to ponder why a fast goes so slowly.

Forty days to unpack and weigh the stuff you carry,

to gingerly avoid jagged edges

as you sort through, evaluate and discard because

you have begun to learn the wisdom

of traveling light or simply

because your legs and your soul

are not as strong as they once were

and why take a risk of 

tripping before your time and 

falling face first into the dust and ashes?

Lent. Again.

Forty days of all things tempting and tempting all things,

forty days of analyzed appetites, considered cravings,

delusions diluted and dispensed,

forty days to wonder if you have spent your life 

constructing a coffin or creating a chrysalis,

forty days bedeviled by the seductive suggestion

to do and be merely good

when the broken heart of heaven is

spending its last erg of strength

and last drop of blood

to trudge uphill

and endure the messy, 

agonizing business

of making you new.

Lent. Again.