Beginning Mind
Riding in our old blue Buick, my son looks
out his window and asks what clouds mean,
how rain comes out of them, and if it’s the same way
babies come out of bellies. He asks what kind of soft
is in slippers, why worms swim in dirt, why ants build
sand houses, why there are planets to live on at all.
His questions jolt my not-yet-caffeinated mind
from lulling into the morning news or calculating
the number of minutes we’ll be late to kindergarten,
and pull me into the space of math and myth that physicists
and philosophers have searched without end.
I don’t know, honey. What do you think? I say,
but he pushes – just remember back to college,
as if I’ve lived too long not to have figured it all out.
At home, between bites of strawberry he holds by the “grass,”
he tells me he thinks Granny dissolved into heaven and lives
a dead life. Later he asks if they ever make new Grannies.
He says he knows where heaven is; it’s past space,
and where heaven ends, the past begins,
where the past ends, is the future.
--Jill Burkey
(Mark Fischer Poetry Prize Winning Poem, 2015)
Riding in our old blue Buick, my son looks
out his window and asks what clouds mean,
how rain comes out of them, and if it’s the same way
babies come out of bellies. He asks what kind of soft
is in slippers, why worms swim in dirt, why ants build
sand houses, why there are planets to live on at all.
His questions jolt my not-yet-caffeinated mind
from lulling into the morning news or calculating
the number of minutes we’ll be late to kindergarten,
and pull me into the space of math and myth that physicists
and philosophers have searched without end.
I don’t know, honey. What do you think? I say,
but he pushes – just remember back to college,
as if I’ve lived too long not to have figured it all out.
At home, between bites of strawberry he holds by the “grass,”
he tells me he thinks Granny dissolved into heaven and lives
a dead life. Later he asks if they ever make new Grannies.
He says he knows where heaven is; it’s past space,
and where heaven ends, the past begins,
where the past ends, is the future.
--Jill Burkey
(Mark Fischer Poetry Prize Winning Poem, 2015)