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Posts Tagged ‘small things’

No Detail Too Small 

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 7, 2026| 10 Comments »


 
The weather changes the beans, 
Svetlana tells me as we sit in her home.
I sip the coffee she’s made me, 
a blend she and her partner created
from five different beans that they roast
themselves. She can taste in her cup
whether the growing season was rainy 
or dry. Everything changes everything. 
No detail too small to link us to the world
of the real, to help us remember who we are. 
I am thinking of the piano player 
today in Santa Fe. As her hands
flew across the keys, passionate 
and precise, it was the way she moved
her eyebrows that stirred me,
her utter commitment and wonder 
expressed in a single arch or furrow, 
lift or frown. I am thinking of how 
my friends Don and Mindy have written 
the word wisdum on the wall in their home, 
and how all day I have giggled about it.
They can seem so trifling, the details 
that capture us, claim us, rearrange us.
I once thought redemption was something grand. 
Something costly. Unlikely. Now I believe
the lost pieces of ourselves can, in part, be 
recovered through noticing the smallest of things— 
the raising of a brow, a handwritten word, 
the treble notes in a roasted coffee bean. 

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Small Stuff

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 21, 2022| 8 Comments »




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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Instead of Shutting Down

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 24, 2021| 10 Comments »

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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