NaPoWriMo, Day 11

Touch the Wound

 
When you return home, I catalog
the day—dishes washed in clementine
soap, stacks of shirts and jeans
folded. I tell you the same story

each evening, how I knitted a baby
blanket for a friend who’s having another
boy, our cat who wouldn’t take his heart
medication. I want to feel useful because

in this world, a woman can’t just sit
and listen to the wind in her rose garden,
or stare out the window for hours with
a cup of tea. That would be doing

nothing and anything—food scraped
from a knife—is better than watching
a woodpecker beat against the slash pines,
would be better than saying we

have no children and I fill my day
with quiet and often sorrow. What
I am trying to say is I touch the wound
when the birdsong becomes tires

screeching on the street outside, a bus
unloading noisy children who run past
our driveway at seven-thirty and three. There
are many devastations: a backpack draped

over a small shoulder, a princess lunchbox,
little voices rising above my garden, my tea.
The birds who startle, take flight.