Balm in Gilead

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries
dour Jeremiah in granite tones.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” replies
a Negro Spiritual.  The baritone

who chants it, leaning forward on the platform,
looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm
that rinses air to reveal earth's surprises.
Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies,

their breed's survivor's, sucked a flower's last blooms,
opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass,
and printed on the sky in zigzag lines,
watch bright things rise:  winter moons, the white undersides
of a California condor, once thought doomed,

now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.

—Grace Schulman

from The Paintings of Our Lives:  Poems by Grace Schulman

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