They ask such questions now.
The afternoon news program
tells me stars are disappearing—
we manufacture day all night,
egos unstitching the darkness.
I am so amazed at the times
I’m actually alive. My answers
about war and bad men sound
like platitudes. A coastal disaster
far from this farmland, living
in a creaky house I didn’t build,
drinking water from a well
I didn’t dig. I am so amazed
at all the times my children are alive—
like snow over the ocean,
aurora borealis, a mirror mountain
lake made from a volcano.
They open mouths, hands,
belief-spaces to swallow my analogies
for headlines as we zip through town,
their round faces in rearview reflection,
another question surging,
the next wave washing the scraps
of shell farther from my useless hand.
Silence is never an answer until it is.
