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Posts Tagged ‘small things’

Small Stuff




It can be so small, what saves me.
   Like the crow that arrives every day
     in the same green spot in the yard.
Like the baby bunny that lives
   beneath our porch who locks eyes
     with me every morning.
Like skinny dipping with Corinne
   in a frigid alpine lake. Bite of radish
     just picked from the garden.
Scent of wild roses on the trail.
   It does not make sense that pleasures
     so small could somehow stand up
to a ransacked heart, and yet
   when I hear the whir of hummingbird wings
     or see the tiny purple of a Lady Slipper
rising out of the dirt,
   I notice the dogged joy in me,
     how it glimmers against the dark
like the shooting star I saw tonight,
   long and brilliant and red,
     or like the owl in the spruce trees
that with only a handful
   of low and sonorous notes,
     redefines the night with song.

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Cast your lot with all small things.
—Sharon Corcoran, from her new poetry collection The Two Worlds


Today I cast my lot
with the tiny tea leaves
giving their all to hot water.
I cast in with the light touch
of my brother’s hand on my shoulder
and the slight whimper my mother makes
when she finds in the closet the gift
my father had bought them for Christmas.
This, the first full day of life
without my father,
a loss so big
that all I can meet
are the smallest things—
candle flame, scrap of song,
orange butterfly wing.
They lead me like crumbs
toward courage, toward life—
and so I join in with the teeny blue flowers
still blooming on the rosemary bush.
I cast my lot with the thin creak of hope
heard only when tears are falling,
with the faintest gleam of love
only able to be seen in the darkness.

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