Cricket
Tiny machine
Chromed joints
Sculpture eyes
Simple grass-bound insect
Chirrups.
His minute form
And miniature mind
Contain
A single song.
Category Archives: Poetry
What counts
Some count blessings.
Others count bleedings.
Clean Slates
Every day is a clean slate.
Every minute a fresh start.
Every second new.
We are children
We are idiots
All we do is blunder,
Make mistakes.
We’re lucky we get
Countless
Redos.
Paper Boy
I had a dream
I was a paper boy
I had paper hair
Paper teeth
I crinkled when I laughed
And when I cried
I fell apart.
Paper isn’t allowed to cry.
Human moistures destroy
Anything made of paper.
The next day
My old papers fallen away
I’d become paper mache.
One step stronger
For having been destroyed.
It will happen again
And again.
Always a circumstance is greater than you.
Always you are crushed.
Always you are reconstructed.
Scar tissue
Is stronger
Than anything ordinary.
Winning him over
The first day
We showed him the world we had created.
Eager for him to join,
We overwhelmed him with a tidal wave
Of stories, emotions, what made us laugh,
Everything we had learned.
There was a wall behind his eyes.
He watched us but did not understand.
We were sure we’d messed up.
Insulted him somehow.
Or maybe he didn’t like who he saw.
That night, we talked it over.
His worried face in our minds grew clear.
What we had taken for judgment was fear.
He was the one who hadn’t been included
Who felt like he didn’t belong.
He was left out
Left out
And we hadn’t read it right.
The next chance we got
We treated him with more care
Curated his responses
And were rewarded
With uncommon warmth and gentleness.
He relaxed
Into a sage glow
And told us of his life, fears, loves.
Such is the difference
Belonging can make.
Sarah D. Silvey 