Point of Departure

My time of promise, before mistrust of parents settled into growing fear and grief into angry disappointment Began with a visit from a GreatHorned Owl dying on our barbed wire fence Announcing she would go before but return for my time to follow heaven's departed promise. But, my father responds, Only straight humans sing in white evangelical Heaven, And this planted my seed of doubt A cosmic point in bitter anticipation of further adult atrocities to follow in imaged flight From this brief encounter with natural and spiritual wings I gradually developed internal witness: If not ecologically necessary, then not yet theologically sufficient. Now, still breathing, singing and dancing, beyond all reasonable health risks of my own environmental history in a new barbed millennium, on the cusp of 2020 EarthJustice left and right winged co-revision, Heaven's great-returned owl revisits in near nightly dreams Inviting me, and us, to set aside anger, to grab hold of more compassion ego/eco-therapeutic communion communication Inclusion in Heaven's climatic winning ecologically wise theologies, long incubating Rapture-- safe flight home.