Do I want to live? Do I really 

want to live with every sense, 

in each moment, vibrantly alive?

Do I want to feel from the marrow 

of my bones out to the last millimeter of 

peel of skin?

Do I want to be touched by sun, 

embraced by racing briny air?

Do I want to see the effervescence 

of a hovering hummingbird’s 

feathers?

Do I want to witness a sun rising

shimmering red–orange orb

out of night, or pinking blushing 

and purpling into sinking gold below 

the horizon or beyond a mountain or 

into the sea?

Do I want to hear the morning sounds 

of honking migrating birds, mourning 

doves in the  eaves, or the whispering 

to howling of hurricane winds?

Do I want the up and down, 

before and after, beneath and above 

within to return to balance, undeviating?

Do I want to love, allow all the way in

surrendered, entered, seen, known, without 

glamor or mask or armor?

Do I want to laugh and weep and wail and 

dance and swim and sail and walk and climb 

and, and, and? 

Do I want to honor the ancestors

the spirits, invite them to our

tables, say their names out loud, 

tell their stories and ease their 

haunting embrace their holding ?

Do I want to heal what had been 

broken and make of every broken place 

brilliant knowings and wealth?

Do I want to place on funeral pyres 

what is no longer of use, was never 

of use, was always perjury placed 

in the way by avarice and misogynoir?

Do I want to love myself enough 

to conceive and carry myself

to labor and birth myself, to succor

and nurture myself anew and 

to earn my own life? 

And should I want to live

Will I decide to live and if

I decide to live will I

Insist on living joy?

I do. I do.

© Andrea Canaan

Rio Vista, California

October 3, 2020