WEAVE by Roshi Robert Althouse (first poem I ever wrote)

Weave

your grandmother’s tomatoes and your neighbor’s lost eyes

the crack left by the jet plane, now far away and the crystal pattern of ice on the morning window

the lost rhythm of your native tongue and the laughter on the neighborhood stoop

the broken lamp post and the lost key

let the proclamations remain dangling

the tomato will be fine without them

there are already too many sad eyed stares in the public square

longing for children’s laugher and snow cones on a hot summer day

trade in the confident certitudes still born where they lay

with village mothers teasing the young men

and stories that forgot their own names

put on this garment and life will find a way.