Grace Cavalieri

In Every Dream An Orphan Builds A House

In each room there is a stone that glows a name
Detour to the hall where Truth is stacked like building blocks
Down the hall are pictures on the wall, each child’s face is shown
The cats lie sleeping fat from touch
The dogs bound outside without a leash
Every day is a different color. Grey has been removed
from the earth back where it belongs
The orphans no longer paint houses with their sticks of red and blue
They no longer need to imagine.

Grace Cavalieri is founder and producer of “The Poet and the Poem” on public radio now celebrating 38 years on air, now from the Library of Congress, She has 18 books of poems and 26 plays produced on American stages. She won the AWP’s George Garrett Award and The Folger’s Columbia Award for serving other writers, plus the National Commission on Working Women; and, for poetry, two Allen Ginsberg Awards (1993 & 2003,) The Bordighera Award, The Paterson Award, D.C. Humanist Award, among others. She received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington independent Review of books where she is the monthly poetry columnist.

www.gracecavalieri.com
www.loc.gov/poetry/media/poetpoem.html