The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by James Grabill

BELIEF

Let’s make this as quick as it can be.  I don’t believe
in the donkey of clover when everything parks a car
on the back of a molecule, if that’s what it does.  
When what weighs is what might float, and the weight
of river water allows for the newly tamed next electrons.  
When a person lights the room, and the walls can finally
become themselves.  When what a person cares about
deposits a wreck on the beach: health care, dollars,
the Statue of Liberty, good films, etc.  When in shadows
of Farm-All iron wheels, a man in Ohio sees root muskets
glowing darkly under the rapids.  And I think this even
if suddenly everything breathes when anything breathes.  

For I believe in the one only person, the next one only,
and a next, and a next prayer-beaded, sweat-salted
exchange when a dragonfly reaches an overgrown field.  
Daylight has already known nothing and made its will out
to a body that readily shows its ancestors, not to mention
the spiral brain tower in Barcelona or elephantine gymnasium
before us.  Buddha prayed as a human, because he had to eat
or die.  Quickly he lived for free.  I believe he saw
that when we take too much for granted, prices rise
and at once the cost of honest breath is suffering.



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