If the individual plants in our patch of grass were people or trees, how much space would they need to survive and thrive? They are a multitude. However, I walk through or in a forest or a crowd, and I walk on a lawn; I am small in one instance, large in another; a humble supplicant; the possessor of great strength and power. And always, I have a choice of being beneficial and kind, or heedless, destructive, and cruel; a choice to live and step as lightly as I can. Rake me, then, into a pile to be burned, that I may be as fragrant smoke from countless glad childhoods.
August 13, 2020
Everything and All
These are not paper letters, I know. They do not arrive in envelopes. And yet they can be read by the fire, or at the kitchen table while the soup is on and the bread is in the oven. They can be examined like leaves from the yard at your desk by the window. They bear no scent. There are no handwritten clues. And yet you can imagine both. And as you do, you become the letter yourself. Two authors, two writers, two recipients. And a multitude of messages, one for each thought, each glimpse, each silence, each present, each past, each eternity. All in the moment. And when you look up, and around you, and in and out and beyond, to the graves and the wind and the snow, to the meadow and the fallen tree, to the granite-sleeping shadow, to the deer and her young on the narrow path that leads to the still water, what do you know? Everything. Everything. All. And what you know is what I feel.
Recently Banned Literature, November 30, 2017
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Categories: New Poems & Pieces, Recently Banned Literature
Tags: Childhood, Consciousness, Diaries, Grace, Humility, Journals, Kindness, Letters, Love, Multitudes, Poems, Poetry, Reading, Smoke
William Michaelian 