Today, you’re looking at your hands.
You’re thinking time has made a mistake
and those palms are far too rough and course
for someone your age.
Yet you remember the uncle
who fell and never got back up.
That’s not you.
At least, not yet.
You’re always fending off an attack, you say.
Or are in need of hammer and nails.
There’s work to be done –
on a bookcase
and maybe even on your frontal lobes.
You do your share of pacing.
You’ve had it with people who are
always threatening to shoot.
You’re concerned by all the books you’re not reading.
And your job – what you call shoveling shit.
Yesterday, a friend took sick.
He’ll be in hospital for a month.
You don’t care much for your neighbors
but you respect their differences.
You miss your wife.
And your sanity is not fully engaged
with what’s happening in your head.
You prefer your dark room of sleep
to most company.
And you see the Earth as an ark,
floating through space,
constantly ditching the ones
who can no longer pay their way.
You stand in the doorway,
feel the draft of the world’s grief.
And yet there’s still
this small persistent heat.
John Grey
(Image by CJA)
Saragun Springs 
A wonderfully sketched commentary on that thing we prosaically call life and that just keeps getting dealt with. A splendid reflection on an everyman as he wends his way through the cosmos on the little blue planet. It says so much in so few words. Right on, John!
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John
Thank you again for the past few days of poetry and we hope to see more from you again soon.
This poem strikes with a person like me because arthritis and something called Dupuytren’s Contracture (I never spell that right–it’s something I share with Margaret Thatcher–but is something that happens more to men) have turned my hands into things that I refuse to describe as “claws” unless forced to. But then again, there is nothing in the shape of these words that would infer either of those things. So we keep keeping on.
You have your own look at things and your singular way of expressing it. Well done!
Leila
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John
The image of the earth as an ark floating through space says it all. It resonates with the dove with the olive branch and the rainbow. As the days pile up the griefs continue to pile up too (for all of us). The saving grace is that there must be something more somewhere. All these spirits could not have been created only to disappear into thin air for infinity. Physics itself says that once energy is created it can’t disappear. It changes form, but doesn’t vanish. Memory and imagination are both separate realms of the spirit as well, interpenetrating, separate realms, and possibly ongoing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, we just don’t know where it’s going; and that’s as it should be. Thanks again for sending your work to the Springs, send more whenever you can!
Dale
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