Will To Bend
Knees let us bend and straighten,
serve us to stoop, to reach, to play,
to kneel, to tend to smaller things.
My old knees, stiff from age
and injury, grind like bags of gravel,
defy the easy swing, like the gate
no longer used between our yards.
I remember your young knees
jumped over railings, over
rushing rain in gutters, over
cracks that break your mother’s back.
They kicked through puddles, piles
of leaves, down dusty gravel paths.
They crouched to spy on pirates, watch
the spider spin his web, and hide
behind my rocking chair
to boo my breath away.
My knees, grown too weary for play,
rock on my porch and ache for
those mischievous eyes.
I remember like yesterday, I stopped
to kiss your soft pale cheek, lay
your sleeping head to rest, pick your truck
from off the lawn where it was left.
I bent to gather papers left piling
on the drive, to cut last blooms of summer
for your little plot of earth, to fetch
the wood for fires to warm my winter hearth.
I knelt to plant impatients in the spring
beside your grave, to sow the garden gone
untended, to find the other shoe
beneath the chair where you once sat.
But my knees can no longer kneel
to that god who wants to be asked
when he’s already made up his mind.
My knees grate against all that grateful tolerance.
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