I like life enormously—
Yes, when it’s a big dog looking to catch
my eye and lean in heavily against me
with its thick hair, its petal soft ears,
and I like life when it doesn’t behave,
when wind edits the book out of my hand.
I like life when it rises like a fat moon out
of the bay and when the new moon holds
the old moon in its arms, which I learned
to see from reading “Sir Patrick Spens,”
and despite the deadly storm Sir Patrick
read in that moon, I like reading and seeing,
and also fog when you can’t see and have
to trust the bridge has another end. I like
cardinals at 4 AM impossibly loud, babies
then too, and life when the furnace goes out
and the house is cold, a problem to solve.
I like problems that can be solved.
And the ones that can’t—the shipwrecks,
ruined cities, the gaunt children staring
from hospital beds? My house stands firm,
my hip still mostly works, nothing harmful
is falling from my sky—so I can’t say.
But I hope I would like life the way I did
today when I pulled to the side of the road
and wept as the reporter described people
liking life so much they were searching
through rubble, going brick by brick,
looking for bodies in Mariupol.
Somebody give it back, give it back,
beautiful life. Give it back to the bodies
not answering from under the wreckage—
precious life, crocuses opening, lazy
snowflakes floating down in Kharkiv.
Give it back to the little girl pulled from
under fallen roof tiles, the one arm
she has left. Let it be her left, let her be
lefthanded. It’s not much, it’s just a start.
It won’t be easy, but it’s life.
Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You. Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (both winners of the Four Lakes Prize from University of Wisconsin). She has poems, recent or forthcoming from Solstice, Persimmon Tree, Tar River Poetry, Plume and Image. She is faculty emerita of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
