find One

the woman with bewildered eyes

the youth with sunken cheeks

the man with angry menace

ready to explode

the wisp of a girl pleading

without a word

each with a story

each longing for recognition

yet inspiring fear

and met with hurried looks away

as though their burdens

are too much for even two to bear

until they have found One

who understands and cares

dangled

all his life at the rim of a cliff

hanging or being dangled

coarsened by exposure and fear

insecure, victimized

blaming because he would not

have chosen this for himself

never learning compassion

as none was given

never grasping empathy for never

safe to feel beyond his own terror

poor Bluffo, family history tells us

much except how to help you now or keep you from harm and harming

wishing fairy tales were reality

reading fairy tales by brothers Grimm

and Hans Anderson and folk stories

delighted by the imagination creating

people out of animals and objects

anthropomorphism has a way

of capturing our own delight

of wishing there were tiny people

to inhabit childhood world to be

our friends and explain what we

cannot understand about adults

and how to fit into their strange world

questions I’d still like to be answered

lo, these many years living

among grown-ups 

unknowing

unknowing

how much we don’t know we don’t know

how frightening to get caught up

in situations that assume we understand

but we do not

blessed are those who have friends

or loved ones near to help us learn

what is needful