Today's poem is by Dan Albergotti

Dandelion Spores outside the Methodist Home, 1972
       

Parachutes, thinks the boy as he watches pieces
of the fragile world he's blown apart drift down
toward frogs and crickets in the ditch's alien landscape.

Inside, his mother reads psalms and the grandmother
practices breathing beneath the old, worn blanket
her daughter has brought from home this week.

A sound rests in all their ears—mechanical wheeze
of air conditioning, low buzz of fluorescent bulbs,
mumbled verses, summer cicada chorus. The ambient hum

of every day. The soundtrack of something unnamable,
something that draws a gaze, as with a hook, out the window
to where small anchors keep pulling at the sky.

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Copyright © 2024 Dan Albergotti All rights reserved
from 32 Poems
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission