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
