I don’t know if the perfect poem exists—that may not be a reasonable category. But if it does, my vote might be Donald Hall’s beautiful poem, “Summer Kitchen,” which is printed in your bulletin, in which he captures, perfectly, a moment in time: an ordinary evening not unlike so many evenings that you or I have known. But as he remembers it years later, after his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, died too young of cancer, it is revealed as something much more. He writes,

In her wonderful book, The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of monthly visits she once took as a pastor to celebrate communion with a nursing home on the other side of town.

The annual school year concluding service led by our children.

The great 20th-century fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin, in her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, writes, “It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it’s the journey that matters in the end.”

“Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,