For The Sake Of Strangers ~ Dorianne Laux

humanity. love. respect. (Photo credit: B.S. Wise)

This poem is a tribute to the survival of the human spirit in the face of all adversity, to our capacity to continue living when it would seem easier to lie down forever and let life go on without us. It is a tribute, too, to the way we can support one another unknowingly through the smallest insignificant of acts. It is a reminder that anything and everything can matter in this world in which everyone is joined through the current of life to everyone else. ~ Roger Housden

 

No matter what the grief, it’s weight,

we are obliged to carry it.

We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength 

that pushes us through crowds.

And then the young boy gives me directions

so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,

waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.

All day it continues, each kindness reaching towards another ~ a stranger

singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees

offering their blossoms, a retarded child 

who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.

Somehow they always find me, seem even 

to be waiting, determining to keep me 

from myself, from the thing that calls to me

as it must have once called to them ~

this temptation to step off the edge

and fall weightless, away from the world.