March 2024  |  Volume 34, No. 2

I don’t know

I don’t know how the mud flats

or how the prairie grasses. I don’t know

how the garlic scapes or the beet

greens above the soil. I don’t know how the blue

berries. I don’t know how the wind picks up and carries on

in a maelstrom, how the night mares or the morning dews.

I don’t know how the river knows its way to the sea

but I do know gravity. The weight and heft of the thing,

of living that is. How tenderly one can fall into grass

and just hope, despite all signs otherwise, that the world

(meaning all of us) will turn though I don’t know how

the world turns

only that it does.

—Kathleen Byrd