unbreaking the eggs
so many broken eggs these days
albumin streaming out
leaving yolk to float unsheathed
inside we don’t find paradise
no pastoral landscape humming along
no, it’s despair, powerlessness, resignation
I don’t know how to uncrook the hockey stick
how to bring George Floyd back to breath
how to put the virus back in the bat
how to unspark the fire that swallowed the homes
but it’s like the starfish
shard by shard of fragile shell
I place in my palm
doing something
I trust
to help
germinating
Today the sunflower seeds have split.
They sit like toques on tall green crowns,
leaves not yet spread
but muscled up from the soil
after the kiss of drenched earth
swelled them to bursting,
sent them twisting upward
toward the slow fire of sunlight.
Now their subterranean selves
are held in midair,
incontrovertible evidence that buried potential
may emerge into the light.
My son, fourteen, has sowed plenty of other seeds,
but is still stirred to see so plainly
the black-and-white striped husks
perched atop the sprung green.
Now the cells of these new sprouts
should keep splitting until they, too,
bear golden crowns surrounding
the next generation of smooth striped packets of hope
ready to be pushed into the waiting earth,
ready to split and rocket into light after only
a week’s worth of sunrises and sets.
My son sits paused at the end of boyhood
waiting for the silent prompt that sends
his own cells doubling, his blonde crown
also stretching to sun. He waits, and takes on faith
that like the simple black seeds,
his body houses the knowledge needed
to transform and grow,
to shed one phase for the next,
to thrive in the light.
Hummels on the Doorstep
no judgment on the unclaimed Hummels,
one disaster after another decreasing the importance
of the ceramic girl with the geese
and the boy reading,
demoted to the role of luxuries
(which they already were –
post-WWII knicknacks
celebrating not only
a rapidly disappearing pastoral past
but, also, the fact that
you didn’t expect disaster
to rattle him, her, or
any other china figurines,
no fiery bombs that day –
a luxurious certainty
that’s chipped and cracked now)
