Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by the current Maine poet laureate, Stuart Kestenbaum. His most recent book is Only Now, Deerbrook Editions.
Laboratory
By Stuart Kestenbaum
We’re always thinking of those hours
of splendor in the grass, the glory
in the flowers and trying not to grieve
as if grieving is bad for us, but it’s
one of those necessary vitamins
for which there must be a required
daily amount as much as there is for
happiness and if you were a scientist
in the laboratory of life you would be
pouring the sorrow and happiness
back and forth in the test tubes,
heating them together on your
Bunsen burner, hoping to get them
to combine so that we could go beyond
one or the other, go beyond the grief
that is whispering in our ears.
We would have the two together,
the perfect combination, the joy
and sorrow, the call and response,
the wind and the leaves, the sprout and the earth,
the compost and the seed, because everything
needs something else to make it whole,
even the hole needs its own emptiness
the call in the dark, the echo in the light.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
Send questions/comments to the editors.
