One End or the Other

The last half of this week, my books kept coming up in different conversations. On Wednesday, a friend from the theatre shared with me that his daughter, who has my second book, used one of the poems for a school report. Then on Thursday, I ran into a friend from the seminary at the school she now teaches at and she whispered something to a boy I was working with about me being an author. To top that off, on Friday, I was talking with another substitute teacher who had asked if I was writing a poem. Caught in the act, I admitted to the crime and let him read it. He then shared one of his own which I really liked. This is the one I wrote:

One End or the Other

One end of the stick,

standing high in the

dirt of the earth,

looking to the sun,

sinking in the mud below.

To grab the top, to

hold the heights,

stretching, reaching

beyond yourself,

too much, too high.

The other end,

flat on the ground,

holding the base,

the bottom,

shaking, mud-

filled hands.

No movement,

no rain, no sun,

no leaves turned to the sky,

only the rocks below.

One end or the other,

one impossibly high,

the other with no where to go.

Two ways to be,

to live - or not...

but what if, instead,

the middle?

Walking, holding,

exploring the trail,

using the stick as a guide,

a companion along the way

to steady the feet,

to trust the road ahead,

learning to see

the forest in the trees.