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

I Do What I Can

I do what I can to live.
It is a sacred obligation.
But did I fly once?
Did my heart rise from the earth
like a feather and say,
I am a net into which earth spills its blood?
A dream catcher,
looking through the clearness
of every stone, planet, track or dune,
and I rose to receive them,
to pay them homage.
To expand with the great arms
that received me,
and caught the light of constellations
in my hair like a bank of snow?

So what am I to do
if my soul has used up all its words?
If the faces in the mirror have gone away,
and I weep with remembering?
There are days
when the days are not large enough
to hold all the things
that I put in my sack.
And yet,
like a child with his box of toys,
what I pull out
does not give me what I need,
looking through the window
at the sky, and asking,
if my life goes on,
where can it go?

Except back to the things I have collected,
and wish to show,
and sit quietly with the companions
I found in its hours.
Who never left me,
even as they’ve gone.
Now is the time to knock on the door.
Now is the time to listen.
Now is the time to learn my name.

Published inIndex of all Poems