One Day

Dusk at at the Citadel, the ancient fort, the two kites are the holdout to the day's kite runners. I sit at the hot cobble stones. I watch that boundless sky attempting impossibly to make out the thin string that holds them to the ground and the young boys whose mothers I'm sure were calling them for dinner.


It's as if one says to the other one day one of us will be lost to the other. It had always been you (lost) to me but this time it's different. Grace says it best.


One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other

this has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this
business of con-
fronting the
preference for
survival

of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not your spirit
I probably mean

there is always
something to say in
the end speaking
without breath one
of us will be lost
to the other

-Grace Paley

Begin Again

I woke up this morning and the first thing that came to my mind was a poem that had the words “begin again.” So I googled it and found the news that she had passed away last Wednesday. Her name is Grace Paley. I’ve never met this woman but she is a huge memory trigger for me. It’s the first book I picked out from the shelf of an old friend and somehow it stuck in my mind. The first short story I read of her is also the shortest story I've ever read, barely a page and a half and was about a woman returning a long overdue book (25 years) at the library and meeting her old husband there. It doesn’t hurt too that when I read her, I felt that she gave words to thoughts I would only dare say, muffled even when I knew no one was listening, to my pillow. Often I'm puzzled at the intensity that a seemingly insignifican fact seems to hold such importance. I don’t know why this happens but I have learned not think too too much about these sometimes obsessive impulses in my brain about things that I fear are either disconnected or useless. If I give it enough time, it leads me somewhere and often in surprising ways. So here the poem by one of the best voices I've ever heard among writers.

In the Bus

Somewhere between Greenfield and Holyoke
snow became rain
and a child passed through me
as a person moves through mist
as the moon moves through
a dense cloud at night
as though I were a cloud or mist
as child passed through me
On the highway that lies
across miles of stubble
and tobacco barns our bus speeding
speeding disordered the slanty rain
and a girl with no name naked
wearing the last nakedness of
childhood breathed in me
once no
two breaths
a sigh she whispered Hey you
begin again
Again?
again again you'll see
it's easy begin again long ago

---Grace Paley

A new version of me at six and thirty

I am running into a new year,
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself
when I was sixteen and
twenty six and thirty six
even thirty six but
I am running into a new year
and I beg what I love and
I leave to forgive me

--Lucille Clifton