✨ A Poet’s Thanks

my heart filled ...

A Poet’s Thanks

Off in another city, or maybe a clean quiet town
with brick homes and front yards of rhododendrons,
bloomless azaleas, you are doing something today. 
Are you a cook? Is it you who’s involved in peeling, 
slicing, stuffing, baking? Or maybe you are with a book, 
or a child is playing at your feet. 

I am here, playing with words, my heart filled with something
you could call thankfulness, but which is much wider than that.
Something which says, you didn’t need to make room for this—
the onions, the beets, the linen closet, the river and the copper
Palisades. Your life was full without my words, but you’ve held me 
in a space out back, near the red tree, and I am like a flute
set amidst the leaves, singing when the wind moves through.

—L.L. Barkat

Used with permission of the poet. Photo by Jeffrey Zhang, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.