Grace,
when it comes into a room,
is recognizable
but hard to put a finger on,
impossible to still.
Somewhere between
the plummet into love
and wonder at
a new green upshoot.
It comes
to re-balance us
and is gone.
Category: Poems
Claiming Days as our Own, 2021
I tell everyone how
I share a birthday
with the Reverand Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Though we commemorate it
on a moving Monday.
I celebrate both.
I claim the whole month.
Country songs ask us
to live like we are dying.
Which we all are.
Our birthdays point out
someone changed their lives
rapidly, seismically, for ours.
My father-in-law loves to say
his birth marks an anniversary
of Mother Teresa’s, though it’s really
her baptism date, another kind of birth.
Now we have twins
starting their 3rd year
on their 2nd birthday,
the last day in February
on a non leap-year.
After the wildest two
years of our lives:
birth,
pandemic,
election,
marches,
and otherwise.
Where You Are
You want to be
in two places at once,
or two strong people
each want you
in their places.
Something about this
rips out your lungs.
Though you have two,
they’re connected.
Breathe,
until you settle
all where you are.
In Our Taxi
In our taxi
we take a shortcut
through 30th St.,
which I wouldn’t walk.
Which doesn’t seem
to end but carry on
with warehouses,
indefinitely.
And with the broken
streetlight disappearing
address numbers,
all graffiti, upturned
trash or shopping carts,
shattered shadows
into hulking ones…
We were in Detroit
or Los Angeles, maybe
Baltimore.
I think it is the
longest street
I’ve ever seen.
Common Poem 