Pura Vida in Costa Rica

How does the light change red bricks,
smell of gasoline, cut grass,
gash below your heart?

When I was a child at the beach
I thought the day would never end
because it was how I had imagined it:

salt and blue, wind just right
even the ice cream didn't melt.
Tell me what went wrong

between then and now.
I need to know for the next time
when I come back, and I'm lost

in shadow. Open the night shades,
yellow belt of daybreak wraps
around me and Elijah comes late,

the birds already singing
their new songs,
the monkeys flying from tree to tree

the way we might ask questions, trying
a conversation one way or another.
Their tails, an impetus for something

different, the two-toed sloth, too,
twenty hours a day, sleeping,
hugging her baby:

love in the tree
if only for me,
in the light of having seen it.

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Copyright © 2011 Sarah Stern All rights reserved
from epiphany magazine
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission