For Kathy Meermans

Orange leaves float through air

like sunfish lazing in a pond

 

and the hungry boy with a cowlick

walks by my house again, dirty boy,

they say, who watched men set

his mother on fire.

——————His teacher

brings him cheese and apples

in her blue cloth bag

and when he wipes his nose

on his shirtsleeve, she offers him

a Kleenex.

———-Think of how

with the same fingers that now

grasp his yellow pencil, he

will some morning lift out

the lenses of broken eyes,

his hands delivering the blind

to see how orange leaves can swim

through air—the rods and cones

he’s learned, the macula, the cornea,

 

while his old teacher still sneaks

food to broken kids, because?

Because God has no body here on earth

but ours.