When they said the world was coming to an end, 
I thought about my brother, his long limbs,
his good shoulders and thick hair, his small 
white teeth, his beautiful feet at the end
of the hospital bed. How he lies now,
hazel eyes closed, in a metal coffin
embossed with dogwood blossoms. They said
the true believers would be taken up;
first my brother in his dark blue suit and all
the other dead in Christ, then the living,
would ascend to meet Jesus in the air.
But I remembered how my brother and I
already had been raptured,
how each year we were caught up
in spring, reborn again as the flowers
were reborn: first the hawthorn and wild plum, 
pale glimmerings among the leafless trees,
then the violets and honeysuckle,
the redbud and the dogwood, those thick,
creamy cross-shaped flowers pierced
and rusted on the edges, held in rafts of bloom
all through the woods, until we were transformed, 
taken up into the bodies of the flowers,
even as we stood, unmoving,
on a rocky hill.