Today's poem is by Robert Wood Lynn

From the List of My Fears
       

We were, once again, Orpheus's incompetence.
We found everything we wanted in the past
but couldn't bring it with us. We made the same
mistake we always do. We were okay anyhow
so we did not become wiser. Instead, we were
made holy by the persistent foghorn.
Or the foghorn's persistence, we weren't sure which.
We were made beautiful by the act of looking
each other in the mirror and asking if we were
beautiful. We were made hopeful by grass growing
clandestine on the roof. We were alive, most the time.
We were the lingering compromise living made
of the day. We chased groundhogs out of the barn
and for this we apologized profusely to each other
but not, for some reason, to the groundhogs.
This much I loved, like the tenderness of asking
for a favor without saying what it is first.

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Copyright © 2023 Robert Wood Lynn All rights reserved
from 32 Poems
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission