Looking Up

from Miracle Strip by Matt Layne

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about

for Brooke
Music:
Ned Mudd
Copernicus
from the album Buffalo T-Bone

lyrics

Looking Up

I love my friends who tower taller than I.
Even when I stand tiptoed to heaven,
so much of the world is beyond my grasp
without perching precarious upon a shaking chair.
Still I stretch and stretch, until I reach back
to nine years old when André the Giant
came to Dothan. 7 foot 4, he towered so tall
the stars stopped to listen when he challenged
local villains to face him in the canvas ring at the center
of the galaxy. Fans circled André in sweating orbit
and cried for more in that 110° farm center
on the dusty edge of space.

The past fades, and I am here, shorter with age.
Last month’s knee-high roses are eye-level.
Their petals, dark as memory
with a fragrance of earth and tea,
make death a forgotten dream.
A hummingbird lights, delicate and so small,
I must seem a monolith. When it flies, wings whirr,
and I visit that hidden place which only opens
when the world treats me with such tiny tenderness.
Come take my hand, and let us take giant steps.

credits

from Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022
Music:
Ned Mudd
Copernicus
from the album Buffalo T-Bone

license

about

Matt Layne Birmingham, Alabama

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks since he was knee-high to a peanut peg.
I reckon you oughta check him out.