My poem was featured this morning on Silver Birch Press. The prompt was “A Stroke of Luck.’ Such fine prompts from Silver Birch. My thanks to Melanie, the editor at Silver Birch.
The Wisdom Of Wonderland
“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes just one second.”
Lewis Carroll
You looked a little dazed,
like you wondered if you belonged,
a little off-center, nursing a beer
on the patio of that bar in Midtown
where we went to shake out
the work week, before the skip
of the weekend. You looked like the kid
on a playground without a posse,
or a horse for that matter.
You think it was just you who fell
that afternoon. But I knew
I was seeing a lifetime. I just didn’t tell you
because I had to learn to trust first.
First published in I lost summer somewhere
Note: Turns out, that afternoon my future husband had just returned from Nepal. He was jet-lagged and suffering culture shock since he had spent much of the previous decade in Kenya, Malawi, and Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer and trainer. I think I caught him in a weak moment, but our love has lasted 38 years, so we must have known something at a level neither of us truly understood at the time.
