The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Gretchen Hodgin

To Myself When I Am Sobbing to Pachelbel

Get up.  Your tears are stuck to your hair
like oil on feathers, and there's a strand
in both your eyes.  Get up.  How dare

you doubt what you don't understand
and never will.  And why do you
insist on waiting for a hand

to intervene when you've had two
since you were born?  You can't dispute
the world or wonder what to do

when no one's asking that from fruit,
or mud, or fleas, or whales, or wind.
The trees don't question their pursuit,

so why should you?  Get up.  Don't spend
your unassuming history
preparing for your quiet end.

Go be, "Red works on you."  Go be
some picked-up trash.  Get up.  Go be
another person's Canon in D.