This poem of mine was inspired by an interview with Walter Wangerin Jr. at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing. I’m not sure which version I like best, so I welcome reader feedback in the comments box. The first version below is the original; the second is forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review.

The World Looks Back (v.1)

Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge,
her awareness catching me up in its 
      dark river.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed 
      by ladyslippers.
Let me pass, mystified, through her intense, 
      hidden story.
Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their 
      nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in 
      the restaurant,
even if I can cook. Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Good glass between us
keeping our lives diverse.
Let me be here and also
the strange mosaic in his eye.


********
The World Looks Back (v.2)

Give me the disinterested miracle,
someone else’s breakfast
made bigger, the fingertip sheared by the mower
rejoined cozy as a found button.
Give me the half-wild cat’s eye
luminescent in the twilit hedge.
She shakes the dust from her ruffed face,
rolls at my feet, then bolts — but not far,
looking back, her startled face fringed 
      by ladyslippers.

Why else would I shiver in the April dawn
to watch two scraps of blue defend their 
      nesting box —
sit on a pole, fly in circles, return, repeat —
a dull, dangerous life, but not my own.
I want to hear the dogwood,
its squared-off ivory flowers
tipped with rust like sheets stained by childbirth,
rejoicing in its mission.
The voice that moves the scenery
sometimes gives it lines. So give me the angel
telling my neighbor to catch a train.
The two-headed rabbits, beloved monsters
of the tabloids, the pepper with a baby inside.
I don’t want to be the last man alive in 
      the restaurant,
even if I can cook. 

                              Bees are weaving
through the pink streamers of the weeping cherry.
One interrupts its geometric language
to assault my kitchen window
with dreadful, comical thumps.
Let me be here and also
the wild mosaic in his eye.

         forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review