Now the flowers are all folded

And the dark is going by. 

The evening is arising…

It is time to rest.

When I am sleeping

I find my pillow full of dreams. 

They are all new dreams:

No one told them to me

Before I came through the cloud. 

They remember the sky, my little dreams,

They have wings, they are quick, they are sweet. 

Help me tell my dreams 

To the other children, 

So that their bread may taste whiter, 

So that the milk they drink 

May make them think of meadows

In the sky of stars. 

Help me give bread to the other children

So that their dreams may come back:

So they will remember what they knew 

Before they came through the cloud.

Let me hold their little hands in the dark, 

The lonely children,

The babies that have no mothers any more. 

Dear God, let me hold up my silver cup 

For them to drink, 

And tell them the sweetness 

Of my dreams. 

These, fast asleep in such a little room,

The tawdry grave-wreaths crackling over them,

Might have been men who would have moved the world,

Might have been women, mothers of a race

More great than we can know. The could not live:

We have to build great armaments to fight

Forests of things half man, half animal,

Far in the islands that our trading needs:

We have to build high palaces to keep

White childless women merry and content:

We have no money left to save for these,

These, only little children, only poor,

Life in the heats; we have no place to spare

That they could play in …. Yet we need not grieve,

Not more than they, asleep. We need not grieve

Even for those of them who have not died,

For they, made warped and blind by circumstance

Shall live their round from stupid day to day,

Too dull to know a need; and they shall bear

Dull, blinded folk to rule this world of ours

We shall have died from. Do not mourn for these:

Mourn for that sorry world that still shall be,

Made by our careless hands that make today

These little children so to live or die. 

She, being the midwife

and your mother’s

longtime friend, said

I see a heart; can you

see it? And on the grey

display of the ultrasound

there you were as you were,

our nugget, in that moment

becoming a shrimp

or a comma punctuating

the whole of my life, separating

its parts—before and after—,

a shrimp in the sea

of your mother, and I couldn’t

help but see the fast

beating of your heart

translated on that screen

and think and say to her,

to the room, to your mother,

to myself It looks like

a twinkling star.

I imagine I’m not

the first to say that either.

Unlike the first moments

of my every day,

the new of seeing you was the first

—deserving of the definite article—

moment I saw a star

at once so small and so

big, so close and getting closer

every day, I pray.

^{Rutherford Elementary}

When Mark Nicholson spilled his milk on me—a slosh

across my lap—the teacher let me tip the rest

on him, then slipped me in some spare jeans in her closet,

and that was that. From then on, teacher’s pet.

Carroll Toddy fell out the back of a swing that fall,

knocked him out, left a knot on his round head

like a horn. On cold days, our teams devolved

to backwards tag, the boy with the ball running the field,

and all the rest after him—smear the queer—trying

to tag or tackle him. No way to win. Tagged, he’d toss

the ball, lob it in the mob of us, or hurl it high—

snag it and you’re it—scramble past, run cross

the yard. No out of bounds, no teams, no rules,

until the bell called us back inside for school.