sometimes the details of life make it hard to breathe,
make it so that my heart feels squeezed and i tell myself to keep it together–
often i feel foolish because it isn’t over heroic acts or poetic words
it isn’t intense emotions over politics or rhetoric or what’s right or what’s wrong with the world–
it’s about a robin eating berries in the snow (why didn’t he migrate?)
and a detail in the railing that made me look twice,
it’s when a man holds his wife’s hand gently and absentmindedly caresses her arm,
it’s the 1968 photo where faces beam with hope and happiness,
and how his goodbye was a little hurried, like ripping off a band-aid and shaking off the sting