I Can't Save the World

A poem for Jawbone

It’s Jawbone weekend in Kent, Ohio. The poets descend from their many corners to this beating heart center of angry love songs, dirty trick rants, bebop memorials, callback catharsis, nonsense, and fiery delight. Three days of whispering, barking, listening, longing. We miss the ones who have set sail and welcome the new voice wonders. I’ve been tripping downtown for Jawbone for thirteen years, now.

It’s raining, so our afternoon session at Tannery Park might need to move indoors to Standing Rock Cultural Arts. If so, we’ll miss the sound of the Cuyahoga from our elbow crook spot below the train tracks. We’ll miss poems paused to let the miles of railcars clack by, as we all yell “TRAIN” at the top of our lungs—the only reaction that makes sense.

I haven’t written much poetry lately, being deep in it with my climate fiction novel. Just in time, a poem emerged from this warm-up prompt in

Laura Lentz

’s Literati Academy class on Thursday night. It was sweet working on it on this cool, rainy morning with the heady fragrance of Lilacs coming in the window. They’re two weeks early and glorious.

I’ll read this poem at one of the open readings today:

I Can’t Save the World

I can’t save the world, but I can greet the day, loving the dog’s ginger-brown eyes
gazing at me, amber sparking on the surface of each pond in the morning light.

I can thank the tender ferns, transplanted thinnings from dear Mary Greer’s thicket
unfurling from the starry chickweed carpet beneath the dying-yet-blooming redbud.

I can know my children’s faces by running my fingers over the contours of my own,
their strong jaws loosing all the loving kindness and rage their hearts can’t contain.

I can’t save the world, but I can fill my feeders with seed for the courting cardinals
and wrens who shit on my patio table and clog my gutters with their sweet nests.

I can bless the groundhog’s fuchsia-bright fascia, a great brush stroke of interiority
painted on the road, belly full of clover, limbs reaching for the devil strip or heaven.

I can keep practicing this thing of living without masks and allowing the discomfort,
and stop trying to make you want to be the version of you who lives inside my head.

I can sing who-who-who-cooks-for-you to the Barred Owl calling from the woods,
recalling her into the breathing silence of my room with soft wonder deep in the night.