From the Archives: Word (on teaching a forty-year-old man to read)

 

He trusted me to break the word, crack
each segment open until the mystery expired.
Not so this morning.  He stared bewildered
at the board, the back at me.  “I never t’ought
dat word could be so small.  F…i…x,”
he mused.  “Dis word so small.”

How could his daily toil of hammer,
saw and nails; an old lady’s reckoning
of last month’s window
against the patching of a roof this week—
how could her life of sacrifice
and his of labour, sweat and boiling sun
be totalled up in this small word?

ORIGINS

 

I’m rising 
slowly 
from slabs of rock  
seeing 
beyond dreaming, 
for the first time. 
How long have I slept 
in this cave,
its patina
of centuries, dim 
in the yellowing light?
Where was I 
before my rising 
upward and outward 
into the air that draws me 
like a remembered child, 
wind sprouting wings 
so that I fly, face 
towards the earth, 
trees and foliage 
compliant 
in my soundless 
journeying?