THINKING REEDS ASWAY
Happening, nowadays, feels
different, everyone
watching how our shoulders bend
inward as if preparing for a doorway
narrower than most,
how memory with legs
and arms and fingertips for touching well
into oncoming days
reaches out from our past,
though, sometimes,
darkening white clouds cotton to the blue.
The days with their easts and wests
are lit by variable sunshine
moving suddenly across the field
where the old hit places of granite
wait to shine and shine
until the sun’s strange courtesy defers
to passing cloud.
Journalists honing the cheeks of their knives
up/down on the New,
the sky daily threatening to fall,
BEFORE and AFTER wrestling
with their index fingers—
everywhere, in such a time, is hearth.
Like chassid rabbis we’ll dance
unseen in our own towns
between the towns of others,
accessing the information of roses,
the countless pixels of the human face.
The days, each one once
with its morning and its night—
“Someday,”
for us thinking reeds asway,
means now.
– Henry Braun