Originally posted 12/31/2009.

They’re working on race cars in Charlotte, 
baseball bats in Louisville,
beer in breweries coast to coast
and logo T-shirts in Singapore.
It’s the day of New Year’s Eve
and not much is going to change
in the world tonight.
We only think
we write the music
time dances to.

Someday a hibernating creature
is going to wake up from the winter
and we’ll be gone.
It won’t notice anything different except
an increased freedom to be itself.
No engines will roar, no baseballs will soar,
and the only drunkenness will come
when wasps suck the fermented sap
from fallen pears. 

Everything left alive
will be naked, nothing
will happen as a result,
and we’ll be regretted

only as much
as Creation regrets
any other extinction,

which is to say,
not at all.
Something still alive
will begin to dance
on the melody-free earth.

Originally posted 2/11/2012.

the distraught parents
don’t know what to do

their children
have fallen in love
with dust storms

they reach for a bible story
with which to chastise them

god is coming soon
come in out of the grit

but the kids
otherwise enthralled
aren’t waiting for a tardy god

they start a faith
based on watching the wind
bore holes in rock

with a gospel
of how sand
gets into everything
without trying

Originally posted 3/31/2011. Original title, “Chastisement.”

First time you noticed
that brass smells of dirty fingers and ozone
was the day you learned your mother had died.

The keys were in the hand
you bunched up to your face
upon hearing the news.

You could smell and taste them
mingled with tears and dust from the oak table
upon which you laid your head to weep.

These days you dust the furniture frequently
and whenever you handle your keys
you wash your hands right after.

It’s been years
since you thought about
that day.

Originally posted on 4/29/2013;  original title, “The Unimagined Country.”

Yet-to-be-fully-imagined
next country,

country where we let our own blood
into the garden soil to feed it,

where we sing in our own tongues in the front yards
and kneel silently in the back yards

under the open sky, seeking
guidance or a little rain;

country yet to be founded,
already rich and storied,

abandoned, rediscovered,
abandoned and found again and again;

country, not nation, not state;
country, not homeland, not seat of empire.

Country yet to be ours, country
ours to define — country

for us to defend against the poisons
of borders, flags, anthems, suspicions.

When we come to that country
we’ll look into each other’s eyes

and we’ll know what to name it 
without a single politician’s speech.

We’ll know how to run it
without a single task force.

We’ll know how to love it
without a single weapon.

We’ll know we’ve truly settled there
when we look into each other’s eyes

and see a neighbor, a cousin,
or a self, no matter what else we see.