Today some things worked as they were meant to.
A big spring wind came up and blew down
from the verdant neighborhood trees,
millions of those little spinning things,
with seeds inside, and my heart woke up alive again too,
as if the brain could be erased of its angry hurt;
fat chance of that, yet
things sometimes work as they were meant,
like the torturer who finally can’t sleep,
or the god damn moon
who sees everything we do
and who still comes up behind clouds
spread out like hands to keep the light away.
Copyright © 2006 by Bruce Weigl. From Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (Ausable Press, 2006). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.