Out of the Ashes - Beverly Koepplin

I walk out of the courthouse, heart pounding,

traverse the bank of steps with suddenly shaky legs,

and collapse on the nearest bench, limp and nerveless.

It is over, this torture of a marriage, that time of my life,

those years - those decades actually - of miserable nothingness.

I should be glad, I should feel free, I should be dancing.

I sit still, trying to stop the world spinning so fast,

trying to think of how I should feel in this new time,

trying to recapture long-ago years of just being me, if I ever was.

In an effort to settle myself, I gaze around the courthouse lawn.

Off to the side, workers are clearing brush, heaping dry branches,

setting a small fire which soon billows up brilliant flames and rolling smoke.

In one quick flurry, a big dark bird hurls himself into the sky,

lifting up, so it seems, from the flames of the burning pile,

and clearing the clouds of smoke in a seamless high glide up and up and up.

It all happens so fast that even as the bird soars out of my sight

I wonder if it really happened at all, this phoenix appearing to me now,

when a part of me is dying while a new part of me is being born.

How can I die and live at the same time?  I do not know,

but I rise from the bench on suddenly strong legs,

and walk on solid ground toward  the horizons of my new life.

Like the phoenix, I will arise from the ashes and fly high.

My new feathers will glisten in the orange rays of the sun,

and I will know, as the phoenix does, that to be free is to live.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

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