Tess Gallagher
four feet deep, and watered it,
and asked us girls, one by one,
to come over and play, to stand on the edge
and close our eyes, and he pushed us into
the pit. The mud was glossy, he seemed
hardly to notice us, he just
wanted to push another one in.
And someone dared the girl up the street
to touch a piece of dog-do on the sidewalk,
and when she picked it up he dared her
to eat it, I can see the soft disc of it
on the edge of her new front tooth. We climbed
the pig-iron gates at the foot of the street,
gates which we did not know marked
a border of a neighborhood
signed over, in secret, to Christians, who were white,
and Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant,
we threw pebbles at college boys in convertibles
and ran through a windowless garage over
a studded, steel turntable,
my calves weak and hot with excitement.
And heat spread in my chest in fifth grade when I
offered orange juice to that child in the lunchroom,
then told him there wasn't any--Do you want
orange juice? Well, there isn't any--
to see his face small as my brother's
crumple, like the thinnest paper
cup. I'm talking about the power of putting
poison into the bowl with my sister's
fish. My chest was hot as I poured,
I'm saying I was glad.
Sharon Olds
Sleeping In The Forest
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
Mary Oliver
but
you have to swing
and swing and swing
and swing like
a handkerchief in the
wind
Jack Kerouac