Hug

I'm a hugger.
I'm a southerner, an extrovert, a 7, and a caregiver by profession.
I'll hug anyone -- a side hug, a bear hug, a quick squeeze --
they're all good by me.
I'm a firm believer that a good hug is like duct tape, or fresh air and sunshine.

Social distancing is hard for people like me,
but since I'm called to care for my community by distancing,
I'm hugging you in my heart
and in the ways I am able;
like seeing patients, running an errand, or saying a prayer.

I'm a hugger.
I feel connected when I'm in the presence of another
(closer than 6 feet).
Today I'm thankful we can reach out online,
but I also see the hurt and the lack of real social connection
in a world where we are virtually over-connected.

So when this need for social distancing passes over
and we can be close together again,
I imagine we will be much more appreciative
of the worth and power of social connection,
and I'll be the first in line to offer free hugs.

Erin Brackbill, yourdailypoem.com., June 1, 2020

Kindness

Last week, a nurse pulled a warm blanket

from a magical cave of heated cotton

and lay it upon my lap, even wrapping

my feet. She admired my red sandals. 

Once, a friend brought me a chicken

she'd roasted and packed with whole lemons.

I ate it with my fingers while it was still warm.

Kindnesses appear, then disappear so quickly

that I forget their brief streaks: they vanish,

while cruelty pearls its durable shell.

Goodness streams like hot water through my hair

and down my skin, and I'm able to live

again with the ache. Love wakens the world.

Kindness is my mother, sending me a yellow dress in the mail

for no reason other than to watch me twirl.

Anya Silver, singingbowl.org August 19, 2018

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

Do you realize that if you had started 

building the Parthenon on the day you were born,

you would be all done in only one more year?

Of course, you couldn't have done it alone,

so never mind, you're fine just as you are.

You're loved for just being yourself.

But did you know that at your age Judy Garland

was pulling down $150,000 a picture,

Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,

and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?

No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.

Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life,

after you come out of your room

and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey

was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,

but then she was beheaded, so forget her as a role model.

A few centuries later, when he was your age,

Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family

but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,

four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.

But of course that was in Austria at the height

of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

We think you are special just being you,

playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn't mean that he never helped out around the house.

Billy Collins, Aimless Love (Random House, 2013)

Hiroshima

On this day, the sun

Appeared  -- no, not slowly over the horizon --

But right in the city square.

A blast of dazzle poured over,

Not from the middle sky,

But from the earth torn raggedly open.

Human shadows, dazed and lost, pitched

In every direction: this blaze,

Not risen from the east,

Smashed in the city's heart --

An immense wheel

Of Death's swart suncar, spinning down and apart

In every direction.

Instant of a sun's rise and set.

Vision-annihilating flare one compressed noon.

And then?

It was not human shadows that lengthened, paled, and died;

It was men, suddenly become as mist, then gone.

The shadows stay:

Burned on rocks, stones of these vacant streets.

A sun conjured by men converted men to air, to nothing.

White shadows singed on the black rock give back

Man's whiteness to himself.

Sachchidananda Vatsyayan (known as Agyeya) 

"Let Us Be Midwives!" (An Untold Story of August 6, 1945)

Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins.

Victims of the atomic bomb jammed the room;

It was dark -- not even a single candle.

The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,

The closeness of sweaty people, the moans.

From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice:

"The baby's coming!."

In that hellish basement,

At that very moment, a young woman had gone into labor.

In the dark, without a single match, what to do?

People forgot their own pains, worried about her.

And then: "I'm a midwife. I'll help with the birth."

The speaker, seriously injured herself, had been moaning only moments before.

And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.

And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.

Let us be midwives!

Let us be midwives!

Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.

Sadako Kurihara, trans. Richard Minear, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

The Courage That My Mother Had

The courage that my mother had

Went with her, and is with her still:

Rock from New England quarried;

Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore

She left behind for me to wear;

I have nothing I treasure more:

Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she'd left to me

The thing she took into the grave! --

That courage like a rock, which she

Has no more need of, and I have.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, public domain

Something I Could Tell You About Love

The soft smack of pitches from my father

who's never cared for baseball, and never asks

about my Yankees. He doesn't want a glove,

just lets my hardball disappear into his hands

already sore from steering his truck without AC

or radio through the streets of Newark and Elizabeth.

My father, whose shirt is glued with sweat,

knows drums and crates must be loaded tonight,

but still he stands and throws to me across the hood

of his '53 Ford sagging with freight he'll have to carry

tomorrow into stores and warehouses. Tonight

I pound the Rawlings glove he bought me

and watch his face grow dim in the dark of our yard,

then the white ball from his hands into the August heat.

I'm playing catch with my father, who never liked baseball,

who nods when I ask for five minutes more.

Edwin Romond, Home Teams: Poems about Baseball (Grayson Books, 2018)