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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Where the Children Are

Where heaven is
I’ve forgotten.
Or I was never there.
Or it doesn’t exist,
I however know what heaven is.
Being with a child
looking in the grass.
Capturing worms
and putting them back.
Looking through fences
three feet high.
Watching birds teeter on branches,
and listening to the whoosh
of the butterfly.

You are a fool
someone might say,
lost your senses,
looking among sticks
and flaying switches.
But that is, I’d reply,
where heaven is
among children,
using their eyes,
hearing the silence of monsters
in bushes,
and playing tag with the wind
running by.

I have played hide and seek
with Jackie,
put my cheek by Michael’s cheek,
and found the treasure
of lost and found,
and a child’s face smiling,
come in Papa,
find me,
play in the sand,
lets go to the wall
one foot high,
sit and watch the world go by.
And I’ve found a place called happy,
where Jackie and Michael and I,
belong,
going nowhere better but here,
inside us,
where only we belong.

Published inIndex of all Poems