Category: Poetry

There is something I want to tell you
but it starts when we are far from home.
Stay with me.
Come along.
Don’t get lost.

Sometimes we drive back to our house late
at night, on long straight roads
from a friend’s place
after most people are sleeping.
We enter the city on Walnut, street
lights flashing on the windshield
a slow strobe revealing
hiding
revealing
our five children
asleep
eyes the shape of new moons
mouths agape, breathing in
the light that hits all of us
as if we are planets, spinning.

I try but cannot avoid all the potholes,
and the truck lurches. The kids’ heads
are on swivels,
fall to their opposite shoulder
they lick their lips and settle back
to sleep, mouths drifting open
again. Who knows where they are? What
universe their dreams have dragged
them to?

If we’re lucky there’s a parking spot
in front of the house beside the peeling
sycamore. But usually we must circle around,
park in an orbit
somewhere down Prince, across
from the minor league ballpark where we
sat in the sun just last month, roasting,
gulping down water,
soaking in the summer.

At that time of night,
when we return late from our friend’s house,
our truck is
light-years from home.

Or a few hundred yards. But this
(finally)
is why I’m telling you this.
Because we wake up the four oldest and
they grumble-stumble
down the cracked sidewalk
past the shadows, past the alleyways, around
the corner, towards home.

This is why I’m telling you this.

Because I
take 1-year-old Leo from his seat and his
arms hang limp, his legs sway like
pendulums
two separate clocks
keeping the time, counting the seconds
as they drip through the dark night. And
the movement of Leo’s legs reminds
me

of the little boy carried by the soldier,
his tiny legs swinging at the knees,
his waterlogged shoes
measuring the
seconds in drips, measuring
the time it takes to clear
the beach.

These are the longest moments
of all.

* * * * *

To find out how your church can help with the refugee crisis in Syria, please visit the website We Welcome Refugees.

Preemptive Love is a wonderful organization providing relief, education, and medical support to refugees throughout the region. Check out their work HERE.

Or find something else to do. We can all do something.

Legend has it
my dad (who was the age I am now)
dropped me off at college
then cried the whole way home
watering the length of the overpriced
Pennsylvania turnpike with his
salty tears

While that is probably
an exaggeration
or perhaps he was weeping
at the price of the toll
there is still something about
your children growing up
that causes a deep longing
for the days to stop

When Leo takes halting steps
across the kitchen
I want to rise up
stand on my chair
and call out like Joshua
in the hopes that doing so
will keep the sun from moving

These days are gifts
the kind that wear you out
the kind that leave you exhausted
and drinking large mugs of coffee
at four in the afternoon
but these days are still gifts
the kind you want to hold on to
and sip on a little later

But no good comes of stopping
time or trying to reign it in
because these days will grow cold
if we don’t drink them down now

So once again I walk peacefully into
the river the water the current
and it carries me along
to a place where time is nothing
more than one moment after
another

or perhaps time is a road
where the toll we pay
is a heavy one
and there will be some mile markers
that we water
with our tears