Northern Lights

By Amy Marie Bartlett

Love the life before you.

Look at what you’ve got.

Not at what it could have been,

or at what it’s not.

It’s understood that gratitude

does not forego the pain

of lives that ended early

or ones that never came.

But it does remind:

these passing days are dust,

fighting shifting shadows,

doing what we must,

shining like the Northern Lights

in someone else’s sky,

that they and we may learn to shout,

“Lord, do not pass me by.”