Balm in Gilead

By Grace Schulman

“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 survivors, 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.

Copyright Credit: Grace Schulman, “Balm in Gilead” from Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Grace Schulman. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Source: Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002)