What Keeps Us Close
A poem by Cynthia Pratt

What Keeps Us Close

August and the cool evening belie summer.
Somewhere this night the universe
will throw down its discarded debris.
The sky will be filled with meteorites.

We all want to be a part of the joyfully unexpected,
in on the once in a lifetime happening.
There are clouds tonight and the glowing skylights
crisscrossing through the dark goes on without me.

I think of my daughter, now waking in Africa
and miss her. Miss the brown parrots or ibis’
that greet the early hours with their call,
even miss inconveniences,
brushing my teeth with purified water,
the potholed streets.

In Uganda, heat is a broadcast.
The day would lay heavy across my body.
How I loved that blanket and this country
whose sun stays up from 6 am to 6 pm,
nothing under, nothing over.

I write to tell her about the Perseid Meteor shower
that we can see without binoculars this week,
somehow knowing it will be too late for her gazing,
or not in her hemisphere or the wrong weather,
and, of course, what she sees, dodges America.

She may not even care, even though it is these events
that holds the whole earth together
in the small nook of the universe.

About the Author:

Cynthia Pratt’s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Feminist Theology Poetry, Blue Heron Review (2023 fall issue), Sing the Salmon Home anthology (Empty Bowl Press, 2023) and other publications. Her manuscript, Celestial Drift¸ was published in 2017. She is Poet Laureate of Lacey as of 2022.

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