walking the crowded street—
how many thousands of invitations
to fall in love
Posts Tagged ‘strangers’
One Night on Broadway
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged city, love, strangers on December 4, 2021| 6 Comments »
It Just Might Happen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hope, love, strangers on August 2, 2020| 10 Comments »
Everywhere I go, I find them—
people who bring love to the world.
Reading the headlines,
I sometimes think love is dead
and humans are brutes
and we may as well all give up.
But every time I leave home,
I meet pedestrians who wave
and women who give understanding nods,
and men who offer to pay when the person
in front of them is short a few bucks.
People hold doors for each other with a smile
and I’ve seen folks pick up trash
off the sidewalk and go out of their way
to not step on a beetle or a worm.
My friend Wayne says,
We have to love the world
to want to save it,
and sometimes, I think
it just might happen—
though every day unspeakable cruelty
happens on these same streets.
Oh this world.
Even as I feel my guard go up,
I see strangers chatting on the corner
as they wait for the bus,
notice how their laughter
threads through the noise of the day
like a song, like a kite.
There, In the Cupboards at the Cancer Center
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cancer, healing, kindness, knitting, poem, poetry, strangers on November 21, 2019| 4 Comments »
Someone has crocheted a half dozen blankets—
one dark purple, another camo green, another
with stripes in every possible color.
There are half a dozen quilts with bright squares.
And someone has knit a dozen hats—
and a basket on the shelf overflows with handmade scarves.
My friend chooses a pink cotton pillow
that someone has sewn in the shape of a heart
and a long creamy scarf, impossibly soft.
She would rather be anywhere but here,
but look at that smile as she dons the scarf,
as if its stitches are keeping her from falling away.
Return Address from Ohio
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindness, poem, poetry, secret, strangers on September 14, 2019| 5 Comments »
And out of the manila envelope
came a new white hand towel
hand embroidered with colorful flowers,
each one a bright celebration
of what a small amount of thread
and a steady hand can do.
Another cloth, this one edged
in a red and white lace crochet,
seemed proof that framing changes everything.
A photo of two women laughing.
A pink ribbon holding it all together.
A pink sticky note, that read
in a neat, old-fashioned script:
To Rosemerry, from Secret Agents.
There are days I can hardly
believe my good fortune—
just when the headlines
are their worst, a stranger
will reach out with a wild
and tender kindness that frames
the moment with joy,
reminding me that I, too,
might stitch thoughtfulness
and beauty into everything I do,
then share it with the world.
To the Person in the Red Station Wagon
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, love, mistake, poem, poetry, strangers on September 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I was so excited to drop the impromptu Valentine
in through the car window—a white heart
with a big blue eye at its center that I’d ripped
into shape from an old magazine cover.
It slipped through the open window
and landed just right on the driver’s seat,
the eye facing up, the heart facing the door.
Imagine my surprise when my friend Kyra
told me she hadn’t been in town today.
Really? I asked her, stunned. Really, she said.
Because who would think there were two
red station wagons in town with the passenger door
bashed in and the back full of camping gear?
Dear stranger in the red station wagon who parked in town,
I know I didn’t give you the heart on purpose,
but I’m so glad I did. Sometimes our mistakes
have so much to teach us. Now I know
how I want to treat strangers: Like beloved friends.
Like people I thrill to shower with love.
In the Airport
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, kindness, mother, poem, poetry, strangers, tenderness, travel on July 20, 2019| 10 Comments »
I wonder who else today
in Concourse A
is traveling to see their mom
in the hospital, who else
has a parent with a surgery
gone wrong? Who else
could use some tenderness—
perhaps that woman in green
on the transporter? Or maybe
the young mother chasing her child
on the moving walkway? Or
the middle-aged man deliberating
over snacks? Today, it seems
so obvious that all of us
need some tenderness—
regardless our story.
And so when the man
in 31 C offers to lift my suitcase
and fit it somehow
into the overhead bin,
I almost weep with relief,
but instead I smile and say
Thank you, yes, I need help.
All day, I think of how
one small generosity changes
the landscape of the heart.
All day, I am met with chances
to be grateful, to be kind.
Of Strangers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amor fati, kindness, poem, poetry, strangers on February 18, 2019| 6 Comments »
And so it is that kindness stays with me,
the way the woman in the store smiles at me
when she can tell I might start to cry.
I carry her smile in my pocket all day,
like a coin, something I carry everywhere
with no effort, but sometimes forget, and then,
when my fingers again find the ridged edges,
when I feel the weight of the coin in my palm,
I am struck by how something so small
carries value, carries meaning. All day
the smile stays with me. All day, I touch
it again and again, feel how its weight
tips some invisible scale, how I remember
again to say hello to fate and fall in love.
Secret Agents
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abundance, friendship, gratitude, poem, poetry, strangers on January 23, 2019| 5 Comments »
for Sherry Richert Belul
With a LOVE stamp, the woman I’ve never met
mailed me five dollars, “to be a reminder
that abundance can come unexpectedly,”
she wrote, and sitting with her letter in my lap,
I thought of last night’s snow—
five white inches that fell after midnight
and softened the whole hard world.
And I thought of the orchid on my mantle
that sprouted a new stem of purple buds
even as the other stem continued to bloom.
And I thought of my office mate bringing in
nine tins of exotic teas to share. And my daughter
sending me a text to say she loved me “soooo much.”
And I thought of a woman in a town a thousand
miles away, a woman I have never met,
who thought, “I think I’ll send five dollars
to someone who brought abundance into my life.”
How simple it is to manifest unforeseen joy.
How clear the invitation to extend gratitude,
to spread good will, to remind each other
how the world will offer itself, will open
and open and open, how we, ourselves,
are the agents of the world.
What Hands Can Do
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bosnia, greeting, hands, poem, poetry, strangers, taxi on November 20, 2018| 2 Comments »
In my country, he said, we take strangers
by the hand when we greet them.
His taxi wove through the northbound cars
on Lakeshore Drive, and I watched his eyes
in the rearview mirror as they searched
the lanes for where to go. It’s strange,
perhaps, he said, to offer someone
your bare hand, but it’s a nice gesture,
I think. In the world beyond the car,
how many strangers did we pass
in one minute? How many chances
to reach toward another and say
Hello, or as they say in Bosnia,
Zdravo? How many chances
to open some small part of ourselves
and trust the other to do the same?
I wanted to disagree with the man.
I wanted to tell him, that’s what
we do in this country, too. But
clearly his experience told him otherwise.
Here, he said, people shake at the end
of a conversation to make a deal.
But not at the beginning. At least
not with strangers.
I want to start a revolution. I want
our country shake hands more.
I want us to extend ourselves
toward those we don’t know,
to offer them something of ourselves,
to be vulnerable, welcoming, kind.
When I got out of the car, I thanked the man
in his tongue, as he’d taught me, Hvala.
I paid with the credit card in the back.
I didn’t reach forward to seal the deal.
I stepped out grateful for what he gave me—
one more way to revere creation,
one more way to honor what hands can do.
United
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airplane, poem, strangers, travel on November 28, 2015| 5 Comments »
For three and a half hours,
the man in 25 D and I
sit beside each other
and do not speak.
Somewhere, I like to imagine,
is a woman who wishes
that it were she
who got to be the woman
sitting in 25 E. I wonder
what she is doing right now,
perhaps twirling a strand
of her hair and remembering
the way his voice warms
when he says her name.
It occurs to me
that in every seat is a human
who loves and who wants
to be loved. A plane
of lovers, we are,
all of us politely minding
our elbows, traveling
with our seatbelts low
and tight across our laps.
And though we’ve never
met before and will likely
never meet again, and though
we may not even speak
to each other as we fly, just
think of it, all that love
traveling across the country
through a turbulent sky.