shakes out its tent of light. Even dandelions glitter
in the lawn, a handful of golden change.
Amanda Gorman
At the Age of 18—Ode to Girls of Color
At the age of 5
I saw how we always pick the flower swelling with the most color.
The color distinguishes it from the rest, and tells us:
This flower should not be left behind.
But this does not happen in the case of colored girls.
Our color makes hands pull back, and we, left to grow alone,
stretching our petals to a dry sun.
At the age of 12
I blinked in the majesty of the color within myself,
blinded by the knowledge that a skinny black girl, a young brown teen,
has the power to light Los Angeles all night,
the radiance to heal all the scars left on this city’s pavement.
Why had this realization taken so long,
when color pulses in all that is beauty and painting and human?
You see, long ago, they told me
that snakes and spiders have spots and vibrant bodies if they are poisonous.
In other words, being of color meant danger, warning, ‘do not touch’.
At the age of 18
I know my color is not warning, but a welcome.
A girl of color is a lighthouse, an ultraviolet ray of power, potential, and promise
My color does not mean caution, it means courage
my dark does not mean danger, it means daring,
my brown does not mean broken, it means bold backbone from working
twice as hard to get half as far.
Being a girl of color means I am key, path, and wonder all in one body.
At the age of 18
I am experiencing how black and brown can glow.
And glow I will, glow we will, vibrantly, colorfully;
not as a warning, but as promise,
that we will set the sky alight with our magic.
Dorianne Laux
In Any Event
If we are fractured
we are fractured
like stars
bred to shine
in every direction,
through any dimension,
billions of years
since and hence.
I shall not lament
the human, not yet.
There is something
more to come, our hearts
a gold mine
not yet plumbed,
an uncharted sea.
Nothing is gone forever.
If we came from dust
and will return to dust
then we can find our way
into anything.
What we are capable of
is not yet known,
and I praise us now,
in advance.
Laura Grace Weldon
Astral Chorus
Stars resonate like a huge musical instrument.
—Bill Chaplin, asteroseismologist
Late for chores after dinner with friends,
I walk up the darkening path,
my mind knitting something warm
out of the evening’s words.
The woods are more shadow
than trees, barn a hulking shape on its slope.
I breathe in autumn’s leaf-worn air, aware
I am glad to be in this place, this life.
The chickens have come in
from their wanderings. Lined up
like a choir, they croon soft lullabies.
A flock of stars stirs a navy-blue sky.
I can’t hear them, but I’m told they
sing of things we have yet to learn.
Garret Keizer
My Daughter’s Singing
I will miss the sound of her singing
through the wall that separates
her bathroom from ours, in the morning
before school, how she would harmonize
with the bare-navel angst
of some screaming Ophelia on her stereo,
though she had always seemed a contented kid,
a grower of rare gourds, an aficionado
of salamanders, and a babysitter prized
for her playful, earnest care, her love
of children so pure she seemed to become
a little child whenever she took one by the hand,
But it reminded me, that singing,
of the soul depths we never know,
even in those we love more than our souls,
so mad we are to anticipate the future,
and already I am talking—
a year to go before she goes
to college, and listen to me talking—
in the past tense as she sings.
David Romtvedt
Surprise Breakfast
One winter morning I get up early
to clean the ash from the grate
and find my daughter, eight, in the kitchen
thumping around pretending she has a peg leg
while also breaking eggs into a bowl—
separating yolks and whites, mixing oil
and milk. Her hands are smooth,
not from lack of labor but youth.
She’s making pancakes for me, a surprise
I have accidentally ruined. “You never
get up early,” she says, measuring
the baking powder, beating the egg whites.
It’s true. When I wake, I roll to the side
and pull the covers over my head.
“It was too cold to sleep,” I say.
“I thought I’d get the kitchen warm.”
Aside from the scraping of the small flat shovel
on the iron grate, and the wooden spoon turning
in the bowl, the room is quiet. I lift the gray ash
and lay it carefully into a bucket to take outside.
“How’d you lose your leg?” I ask.
“At sea. I fell overboard in a storm
and a shark attacked me, but I’m fine.”
She spins, a little batter flying from the spoon.
I can hear the popping of the oil in the pan.
“Are you ready?” she asks, thumping to the stove.
Fork in hand, I sit down, hoping that yes,
I am ready, or nearly so, or one day will be.
Ron Wallace
The Facts of Life
She wonders how people get babies.
Suddenly vague and distracted,
we talk about “making love.”
She’s six and unsatisfied, finds
our limp answers unpersuasive.
Embarrassed, we stiffen, and try again,
this time exposing the stark naked words:
penis, vagina, sperm, womb, and egg.
She thinks we’re pulling her leg.
We decide that it’s time
to get passionate and insist.
But she’s angry, disgusted.
Why do we always make fun of her?
Why do we lie?
We sigh, try cabbages, storks.
She smiles. That’s more like it.
We talk on into the night, trying
magic seeds, good fairies, God . . .
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went
They say you fall in love with your child
the moment you first hold them,
still covered in blood and vernix.
I held the strange being
just arrived from the womb and felt curious,
astonished, humble, nervous.
But love didn’t come till later.
Came from holding him
while he was screaming. Waking with him
when I wanted to sleep. Bouncing him
when I wanted to be still. Love grew
as my ide
as of myself diminished. Love grew
as he came into himself. Love grew
as I learned to let go of what I’d been told
and to trust the emerging form,
falling in love with the flawed beings we are.
Until I couldn’t imagine being without him.
Until I was the one being born.
Kathryn Hunt
The Newborns
All through the night,
all through the long witless hallways of my sleep,
from my hospital bed I heard
the newborn babies cry, bewildered,
between worlds, like new arrivals anywhere,
unacquainted with the names of things.
That afternoon a kind nurse named Laura
had taken me for a stroll to exercise
the red line of my wound.
We stopped by the nursery window
and a flannel-swathed boy in a clear plastic cradle
was pushed to the glass. We peered at him
and said, “Welcome. You’ve come to Earth.”
We laughed and shook our heads.
All through the night, all through the
drug-spangled rapture of my dreams,
I heard the newborn babies sing,
first one, then another. The fierce
beginning of their lament, that bright hiss,
those soft octaves of wonder.
Christen Pagett
Shells
The curl of your ear,
A tiny pearl of a shell
That I kiss so gently
You can barely feel it,
Barely hear it.
That pink flushing hot
With sleep,
Nape of your neck damp,
As I tuck the blankets too tight.
Remember when you were three
And held one to your face?
Was it a cockle shell, a conch shell?
Some polished swirl of light.
Wet sand on cheek,
You listened.
Like I listen,
To make sure you are
Still breathing.
Watching for that
Tiny throb of life
Pressing at your throat.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Bus Stop
Stubborn sleet. Traffic stuck on Sixth.
We cram the shelter, soaked, strain
to see the bus, except for a man next to me,
dialing his cell-phone. He hunches,
pulls his parka’s collar over it, talks slow and low:
“It’s daddy, hon. You do? Me too. Ask mom
if I can come see you now. Oh, okay,
Sunday then. Bye. Me too baby. Me too.”
He snaps the phone shut, cradles it to his cheek,
holds it there. Dusk stains the sleet, minutes
slush by. When we board the bus,
that phone is still pressed to his cheek.
January Gill O’Neil
Hoodie
A gray hoodie will not protect my son
from rain, from the New England cold.
I see the partial eclipse of his face
as his head sinks into the half-dark
and shades his eyes. Even in our
quiet suburb with its unlocked doors,
I fear for his safety—the darkest child
on our street in the empire of blocks.
Sometimes I don’t know who he is anymore
traveling the back roads between boy and man.
He strides a deep stride, pounds a basketball
into wet pavement. Will he take his shot
or is he waiting for the open-mouthed
orange rim to take a chance on him? I sing
his name to the night, ask for safe passage
from this borrowed body into the next
and wonder who could mistake him
for anything but good.
Terri Kirby Erickson
Angel
I used to see them walking, a middle-aged
man and his grown son, both wearing brown
trousers and white shirts like boys in a club,
or guys who like to simplify. But anyone
could see the son would never be a man who
walked without a hand to hold, a voice telling
him what to do. So the father held his son’s
hand and whispered whatever it was the boy
needed to know, in tones so soft and low it
might have been the sound of wings pressing
together again and again. Maybe it was that
sound, since the father had the look of an angel
about him, or what we imagine angels should
be—a bit solemn-faced, with eyes that view
the world through a lens of kindness—who
sees every man’s son as beautiful and whole.
Todd Davis
Thankful for Now
Walking the river back home at the end
of May, locust in bloom, an oriole flitting
through dusky crowns, and the early night sky
going peach, day’s late glow the color of that fruit’s
flesh, dribbling down over everything, christening
my sons, the two of them walking before me
after a day of fishing, one of them placing a hand
on the other’s shoulder, pointing toward a planet
that’s just appeared, or the swift movement
of that yellow and black bird disappearing
into the growing dark, and now the light, pink
as a crabapple’s flower, and my legs tired
from wading the higher water, and the rocks
that keep turning over, nearly spilling me
into the river, but still thankful for now
when I have enough strength to stay
a few yards behind them, loving this time
of day that shows me the breadth
of their backs, their lean, strong legs
striding, how we all go on in this cold water,
heading home to the sound of the last few
trout splashing, as mayflies float
through the shadowed riffles.
Reflective Pause
The Joy of Presence
In “Thankful for Now,” we see Todd Davis pausing to appreciate an early evening scene while “walking the river back home” with his two sons. It is one thing to notice and beautifully describe the elements of nature, as Davis does—”the early night sky going peach, day’s late glow the color of that fruit’s flesh”—but it is another to cultivate the kind of presence that can make us all “thankful for now,” no matter our particular circumstances. As Eckhart Tolle has written: “You don’t have to wait for something ‘meaningful’ to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need.”
We often strive to reach for experiences and things beyond what we have in this moment and forget the power of pausing and making space to say thank you for what’s right in front of us. Writing of his sons, Davis finds gratitude in simply noticing “the breadth of their backs, their lean, strong legs striding.”
Invitation for Writing and Reflection
When was the last time you felt yourself simply “thankful for now,” for the present moment that allowed you to notice and appreciate every detail of life as it was just then?
Barbara Crooker
Autism Poem: The Grid
A black and yellow spider hangs motionless in its web,
and my son, who is eleven and doesn’t talk, sits
on a patch of grass by the perennial border, watching.
What does he see in his world, where geometry
is more beautiful than a human face?
Given chalk, he draws shapes on the driveway:
pentagons, hexagons, rectangles, squares.
The spider’s web is a grid,
transec
ting the garden in equal parts.
Sometimes he stares through the mesh on a screen.
He loves things that are perforated:
toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons
in magazines, loves the order of the tiny holes,
the way the boundaries are defined. And real life
is messy and vague. He shrinks back to a stare,
switches off his hearing. And my heart,
not cleanly cut like a valentine, but irregular
and many-chambered, expands and contracts,
contracts and expands.
Diana Whitney
Kindergarten Studies the Human Heart
Nothing like a valentine,
pink construction paper
glue-sticked to doilies downstairs
in preschool, the sand table
filled with flour, the Fours
driving trucks through silky powder,
white clouds rising
to dust their round cheeks.
Up here, the Fives are all business:
four chambers on the chalkboard,
four rooms colored hard
in thick-tipped marker, red and red,
blue and blue, oxygen rich
and oxygen poor, the branching vine
of the aorta hanging
its muscled fruit, carmine
blood-flower blooming
in a thick jungle.
My girl squeezes her fist
to show me the size of it.
Pulses it like a live animal.
Taps the double rhythm
that never stops, not a trot
but the echo of a trot, not a drum
but the echo of a drum,
small palms on the art table
laying down the backbeat:
become become become.
Gail Newman
Valentine’s Day
Now that my father is gone,
I send my mother flowers.
She sleeps under a blue blanket
alone on her side of the bed,
fluffing both pillows just so.
She balances as she walks,
one hand skimming the wall.
Sometimes she doesn’t know
where her friends are, who is still living.
Einstein was right about time
moving in two directions at once,
how everything that happens
seems to have happened before,