Corinthians 13:11

I follow Marcia Brady on Twitter: Mo McCormick, Actor/Author.

She posts a video with her older brother and they dance, a fast waltz,

under an oak tree with dozens of hanging pastel paper parasols.

She holds his hands, looks up into his face: he watches her feet.

I wish we were friends. I’d call her, Mo, too, one syllable, low:

prayerful, bovine. Mo asks her brother, do you have a girlfriend yet?

She leads, spins him around: I love her in a way I couldn’t back then.

As a child, I loved the middle girl, Jan, the jealous one, Eve Plumb,

Bible spondee fruit, with a TV J-name, and that blue crochet vest.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child.

When I was a child, I’d see Mo’s face on my tin lunchbox, but now I see

her freckles mirrored a small star cluster visible on clear nights—

Constellation of Bejewelled Silver Studs on Soft Velvet Bell Bottoms.

Constellation of Kindness. Constellation of Purple Devotion.

Related Poems

Poem in the Manner of the Year in Which I Was Born

Little poem, you are too young to remember
the smoking gun, the con man on TV
who looked like a supervillain, or the hominid
skeleton dug up in Africa and given the name
of your childhood dog. You never heard a word
about the IRA bombings, nor did The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre terrorize your sleep. Having no use
for money, you do not understand the concept
of stagflation, nor did you marvel at the satellite
images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. How much
you have missed in the span of half a century!
I want to swaddle you in yesterday’s headlines
and send you back down the river, no wiser
than the day you came blaring into the world.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7

Love is patient and is kind. Love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.