For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.

Today’s poem from me is one I wrote for my poetry reading in 2004. At the time, I worked for a weekly newspaper and this poem touched on my job, which normally I didn’t talk about.

Ash Wednesday, 2004

What must it like to be born
with a hole in your heart,
to live for 39 years,
then die, I will never know,
but it is on this, I meditate
this morning as I receive ashes,
think of the funerals I’m missing:
of a friend’s girlfriend
who died with just such a condition,
the other funerals of family members
of people I have met through work,
of the councilman in the nearby borough
who died, and I didn’t even know it.
I’m so sorry to hear of your loss
seems so hollow. If there’s anything I can do,
as if we could resurrect their loved ones from
the cold, dark ground with empty words.

As usual, the above poem is best read in desktop and landscape on your browser of choice to preserve the line breaks the way I intended them.

Today’s poem from one of three websites that share a poem each day is “Ode to a Yellow Onion” by C. Dale Young on the Poetry Foundation website.