The printer who sets this page with skill, though he may
not admire it.
Singers of solo expertise who defer and find harmonies
instead.
Anyone whose skeleton is susceptible to music.
She who, having loved a book or record, instantly passed it
on.
Whose heart lilts at a span of vacant highway, the fervent
surge of acceleration, palms of the tires.
Adults content to let children bury them in sand or
leaves.
Those for whom sustaining hatred is a difficulty.
Surprised by tenderness on meeting, at a reunion, the
persecutors of their youth.
Likely to forget debts owe them but never a debt they
owe.
Apt to read Plutarch or the Sacred Scriptures with the urgency of one reading the morning
news.
Frightened ones who fight to keep fear from keeping them
from life.
The coffee barista who, no matter how long the line,
will not rush the masterful pour.
The small-scale makers of precious obscurios—pomegranate
spoons, conductors’ batons, harpsichord
tuning hammers, War of 1812 re-enactors, hand-crank for hurdy-gurdies.
The gradeschool that renewed the brownfields back of the
A&P and made them ample miraculous May and June.
The streetgang that casts no comment as they thin out to
let Bob the barking man squawk past them on the sidewalk.
The two African medical students in Belgrade, 1983, who
seeing a traveler lost and broke
took him in and fed him rice and beans cooked
over a camp stove in their cubicle of a room and let him sleep
there
while one of them studied all night at the
desk between the beds with the lamp swung low.
Those who sit on front porches, not in fenced privacy, in
the erotic inaugural summer night steam.
Who redeem from neglect a gorgeous, long-orphaned
word.
Who treat dogs with sincere and comical diplomacy.
Attempt to craft a decent wine in a desperate
climate.
Clip the chain of consequence by letting others have the
last word.
Master the banjo.
Are operatically loud in love.
These people, without knowing it, are saving the world.
Source Notes: My friend Brent Unrau passed this along to me. I thought it a beautiful way to begin the new year.
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