by Naomi Shihab Nye

So, the years go by and we find a few doors and windows.
Some are always open, some were never open.
Because we are crazy and stubborn,
we love the ones that won’t open most.

In our first house the word “crazy” was not allowed.
So I embrace it now.  Crazy, crazy!
It’s crazy we still have war on earth, crazy bombs, crazy ways
to waste our money.  We want people to like us

so we kill their clans to show we’re stronger, then maybe
they’ll like us.  Totally crazy.  When Jack was little
he climbed a tree, looked through the window
onto his own family.  They were saying words

he recognized, mother, father, but he felt
the strangeness of syllables attached to knowing,
and the emptiness of light and dark.
They did not know their son

was watching them so closely and he had already
disappeared, just a little, so years to come
might only amplify the distance.  I’d like to think
we give each other clues.  You drop your notes,

someone else finds them, makes more of them
than they were even to you.  Jack was brushing by
on a street, carrying everything we needed in his briefcase.
He had a ring of keys, a sack of shiny hinges,

tall folded ladder, file of riddles,
“What We Need To Find Out.”  He was whispering

and shouting at once.  If I was lost in a dark alley I would
have wished to find Jack.

And I did.  That accent which will never leave
your ear once you hear it.  Slant of syllable,
sharpened line, wry take on craziness that helps us
live with it even if we cannot cure, cannot fix,

are not supposed to say its name.

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

Now that I cannot do it alone,
my tall son leads me
into the chilly waters of the bay
where I float above the jagged bottom
stroked by seaweed
rocked by ripples from the passing boats.

More than forty years ago
he lay in the saline waters of my womb
rocked by my rhythms
absorbed in becoming.
Now, he helps me out and seats me
on the sand.

“Look, Mom,” he says, “there’s a crab!”
He nudges it out of the water with my cane
and . . . surprise . . . there are two,
copulating crustaceans,
glued together,
accomplishing life, as we have done.

by Leslie Ullman       

a prickling like tiny, almost
downy cactus thorns that work
their way through leather gloves
sometimes settles at the periphery
of my thoughts when the person I love most
is troubled.  Even here, two time zones
away, astonished to find one at last,
I pick up a heart – shaped stone
carved, polished, laced with salt
and left at my feet by Atlantic tides
and my fingers can feel, along
its mirrored halves, the spines of trouble
against his fine heart.  The little inroads
it makes.  The undertow beneath his jokes
and gentle hands.

My absence leaves
the shape of me when I’m gone.
The person I love most loves my life
as it is.  He takes the ebb
and flow of  trouble
quietly as the fields take
the weather, as the sky takes clouds,
as the earth took the solitude
of its birth into gasses and rock.

The heart – shaped stone warms
in my palm, and now at my feet I can see
scores of  hearts, their different shades
and symmetries, heart – shapes repeating themselves
all along the beach.  The prickling etches spidery
cracks through my hands, as though someone
has thrown stones against them.  I fill
my pockets with heart stones and carry,
though he would never ask me to,
his heart in my hands
as the earth accepts my footprints
and relinquishes them to tides.              

by Leslie Ullman

Balance in moving parts: the rider
spurring her horse on a straightaway
before she remembers to
reach down and tighten the girth
or the skier dislodging new snow in a chute
too steep for a safe fall, skier and snow
riding the crest of themselves as avalanche;        

the vertigo new lovers ignore
at the heights of discovering, their hands
free over one another’s eyes, cheeks, their
histories waiting like unopened parcels
below — they don’t know they
don’t know what’s inside — and
then, if they survive the heat,
the anvil, the long cooling into a calm
devotion, a durable rhythm of speech
and silence, a thin sheen melts
and freezes imperceptibly (and they
know this) on a mountain road
one of them travels every day;

resilience gone slowly, undetected
in the heart, that reliable muscle,
or the hip or knee or tunnels of softening bone —
one moment one holds one’s own in all
the threatened air the traffic and people in a hurry
are pushing through, and then
one doesn’t, or won’t again
without having to consider the weight
and isolation of each limb;
imbalance in moving
parts; separation;
prelude.