MORNING PAPER
By John Palen
If it hasn’t come when I wake at dawn,
I start the coffee, look again while it brews
and again after the first cup. I never hear
the paper carrier’s car, it rolls by
so stealthily, so I keep going back,
peering through curtains at the quiet street
of middle-class homes. In one, a Vietnam
veteran with panic attacks; in another
frightened parents of a 22-year-old
who disarms roadside bombs in Ghazni.
Next door, an old man who lost family,
aunts, uncles, cousins, in the Holocaust.
And still my heart lifts — dismayed at itself,
but it lifts — when the news finally comes
and I see it at the end of the drive,
lying still except when a gust of wind
catches a corner of the plastic sleeve
and it flaps, just once, like a hurt bird.
John Palen’s poetry has appeared in literary journals for more than 40 years, including Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Formalist, Kansas Quarterly, and Passages North, and in anthologies published by Milkweed Editions and Wayne State University Press. He was a finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Competition in 1995 and a Pushcart nominee in 2003. Reach him at [email protected].
The Spy is pleased to reproduce the following from The Delmarva Review as part of our partnership with the Eastern Shore Writers Association Education Foundation. with permission from the Review and the author, John Palen. The Review is a literary journal published by the Eastern Shore Writers Association’s Education Foundation.
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