Healing the Divide - Poems of Kindness and Connection

Recently I read Healing the Divide - Poems of Kindness and Connection which is edited by James Crews. 

There are quite a few poems in this book that I liked or that I wanted to read multiple times. Below are some of them. 

REVISIT

Carol Cone

What do you see when
your baby comes home at fifty?
Do you remember the child
who couldn't sleep a single night
for two endless years
who wouldn't eat most foods
who pushed your hugs away
who gave kisses to no one?

Slowly, the years passed without
a hug, a visit, a Christmas card, yet
whatever brought the epiphany - 
his father's death, a mid-life crisis
or realization that half a life
had passed him by, much too fast - 

he came home at fifty,
erasing years of separation.
Just a visit, an experiment,
still prickly but ready to talk,
to reach out an inch or two 
perhaps to build a fragile bridge
across those missing years.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

SMALL KINDNESSES

Danusha Laméris 

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk 
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs 
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” 
when someone sneezes, a leftover 
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. 
And sometimes, when you spill lemons 
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you 
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. 
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, 
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile 
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress 
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, 
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. 
We have so little of each other, now. So far 
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. 
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these 
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, 
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I CONFESS

Alison Luterman

I stalked her 

in the grocery store: her crown 

of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip, 

her erect bearing, radiating tenderness, 

watching the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket, 

beaming peace like the North Star. 

I wanted to ask, "What aisle did you find 

your serenity in, do you know 

how to be married for fifty years or how to live alone, 

excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess 

some knowledge that makes the earth turn and burn on its axis—" 

But we don’t request such things from strangers 

nowadays. So I said, "I love your hair."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

WAVING GOODBYE

Wesley McNair

Why, when we say goodbye 

at the end of an evening, do we deny 

we are saying it at all, as in We’ll 

be seeing you, or I’ll call, or Stop in, 

somebody’s always at home? Meanwhile, our friends, 

telling us the same things, go on disappearing 

beyond the porch light into the space 

which except for a moment here or there 

is always between us, no matter what we do. 

Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens 

when the space gets too large 

for words—a gesture so innocent 

and lonely, it could make a person weep 

for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown 

voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel 

patting and stroking the growing distance 

between their nameless ship and the port 

they are leaving, as if to promise I’ll always 

remember, and just as urgently, Always 

remember me. Is it loneliness, too, 

that makes the neighbor down the road lift two 

fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes 

day after day on his way to work in the hello 

that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised 

fingers do for him, locked in his masculine 

purposes and speeding away inside the glass? 

How can our waving wipe away the reflex 

so deep in the woman next door to smile 

and wave on her way into her house with the mail, 

we’ll never know if she is happy 

or sad or lost? It can’t. Yet in that moment 

before she and all the others and we ourselves 

turn back to our disparate lives, how 

extraordinary it is that we make this small flag 

with our hands to show the closeness we wish for 

in spite of what pulls us apart again 

and again: the porch light snapping off, 

the car picking its way down the road through the dark.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

EVERYDAY GRACE

Stella Nesanovich

It can happen like that: 

meeting at the market, 

buying tires amid the smell 

of rubber, the grating sound 

of jack hammers and drills, 

anywhere we share stories, 

and grace flows between us. 

The tire center waiting room 

becomes a healing place 

as one speaks of her husband's 

heart valve replacement, bedsores 

from complications. A man 

speaks of multiple surgeries, 

notes his false appearance 

as strong and healthy. 

I share my sister's death 

from breast cancer, her 

youngest only seven. 

A woman rises, gives 

her name, Mrs. Henry, 

then takes my hand. 

Suddenly an ordinary day 

becomes holy ground.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

FOR YOU I'LL FLY

Carmen Tafolla

The earth below us shifts

and the joints of houses ache

with hairline fractures that grow

into faultlines on the walls.

The motors burn out

first the fan and then the garbage disposal,

on my way out the door

to job or bank or nursing home.

The only two burners still lighting weakly

on the stovetop flicker at me.

Things fall apart

sometimes people too 

as crisis-after-crisis beats us down.

Deaths and Close-to-deaths

Loss and Deeper loss.

You can no longer swallow, 

or pronounce.

You reach a hand of bones

to lift my hand to your lips.

Your eyes catch my eyes with kindness,

carry the message as softly as you can 

against this harsh sky.

The song you heard playing before I did,

Por Ti Volare, I recognize.

You sang a million times, before this disease.

I didn't know the English title

was  Time to Say Goodbye.

You pull a shining smile out of this stiff

Parkinson's mask

and gently

release me