#PoetryBreak: Farolitos

Contemplative (M.A. Reilly)

Farolitos

  - by Arthur Sze

    (from The New Yorker)

We pour sand into brown lunch bags, then place

            a votive candle

inside each; at night, lined along the driveway,

            the flickering lights

form a spirit way, but what spirit? what way?

            We sight the flames

and, swaying within, know the future's fathomless;

            we grieve, yearn, joy,

pinpoints in a greater darkness, and spy sunlight

            brighter craters

on a half-lit moon; in this life, you may try, try

            to light a match, fail,

fail again and again; yet, letting go, you strike

            a tip one more time

when it burst into flame--        now the flames

            are lights in bags again,

and we glimpse the willow tips clutch at a lunar

            promise of spring.

#PoetryBreak: Spring Storm

Scottish Rain (M.A.Reilly)

Spring Storm

William Carlos Williams - 1883-1963

The sky has given over 
its bitterness. 
Out of the dark change 
all day long 
rain falls and falls 
as if it would never end. 
Still the snow keeps 
its hold on the ground. 
But water, water 
from a thousand runnels! 
It collects swiftly, 
dappled with black 
cuts a way for itself 
through green ice in the gutters. 
Drop after drop it falls 
from the withered grass-stems 
of the overhanging embankment.

#PoertyBreak: Small Kindness

Ordinary Angels (M.A. Reilly, Dublin, Ireland)

Small Kindnesses

By 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.”

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Danusha Laméris is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, Calif. Her next book, “Bonfire Opera,” will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.