Write You a Bird
I need to write you a bird
so you can see what it is like to fly.
And then after you get your bearings,
I will write your bird a clear sky
and have it launch itself upward,
directly above where you had been back then,
when you were happy and whole.
And I will write about your proms and flowers,
slow dances and holding hands,
first days of school and last ones too.
I will write you the three seconds before a first kiss,
and the times you rehearsed your first ‘I love you.’
And your bird will fly over heartaches and hospital stays,
each of which have left you with scars,
visible and not and I will write you well and strong.
I will write you the first time you felt
my heartbeat with your hand slid under my shirt, and
I will write you harvest moons and autumn farm fairs.
Once I am done writing I will sort and stack
and bind these stories into a book that is a mix of
comedy and tragedy, hope and despair, and I will leave it,
opened to the last page where the story abruptly ended
at the November Audubon trail
where our foreheads, noses, and lips first met.
And I am confident that in time,
either today or eventually,
your bird will reappear, land in the book
and nest in you forever.
• • •
Abandoned Park Swing Set
My pen is running dry, but if I work wisely
and put my words in the proper order,
and don’t include what we have said to each other,
it probably still has one poem left in it.
I can write a play, one act is all I’ve got in me,
and we can rehearse our lines as they should have been,
or change our old roles into new characters
by changing the parts that led us astray.
We can sit down at kitchen table,
with poker chips and a bottle of wine,
tip our hands a little, and this time begin with
the cards that we’ve yet to show each other.
With a half-empty book of stamps
and a poorly folded glove box Rand McNally,
I can cross the county and fill your mailbox
with post cards from all the places we’d circled on the map.
Or I can walk down a winding road with a flashlight,
a flask, and a pocket full of crumbled love notes,
alone in the heart of the autumn Maryland midnight
searching the abandoned park swing set for first date clues
and reasons why we failed to get this right.
• • •
Steven
Harz is the author of multiple collections of love stories, was the winner of the 2013 International People’s Poetry Contest, and is a multi-time winner of The Iron Writer Challenge. His series, “Backroad Love Stories,” covers various topics and moves between stories that, on one end of the spectrum resemble the lyrics of a country love song, to the other end where his words cut into the reader, reminding them of the pain caused by loves gained and lost.