Tag: free-verse

Ash

Today I touched your life
with gloved hands
your story in a few hundred pages
your heartbreaks
and handguns
the worlds you hoped 
to build for yourself
in that flurry of receipts
and licenses
your father's obituary
the picture posed with your mom
I imagined that day
you signed over your son
to someone else's care
and every hour you bent
over another child's hands
as you taught him to play
with bow and strings
In the end this is each of us
wrapped in paper
ash, and loose change

Kafka

There are some things that one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost.

Franz Kafka
There is more than one
way to unearth your life.  Time has
gone before you to
mark out a way to go:
forward, inward, onward, abroad
to wander in fields and in
markets, creating an order
among the days. To
know the terrain, to find
the molten center within yourself, the
still point, a home
within your own breath, one
beat of your heart has
ensured you can never be lost

Alexandria

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hope.

St. Clement of Alexandria
What is hope, but imagination
lifted from the ordinary?
Pahts to lead us, one day
to something we might love

and the belief
that even our own
                 small
                      selves
might walk those ways
into those lives