Toast and Snow
While I battled jetlag and three time zones and the untidy
fumblings of the heart, a snow dusted my mother’s driveway,
the back roads of this bucolic town, and I awoke, groggy
and distracted, to an electric whiteness under a clear December sky.
Then: two slices of wheat toast, a glass of orange juice, coffee
cream-and-sugared, and now I’m on the couch, trying, calmly,
to remind myself that it is impossible to keep everyone happy.
Things will splinter and break no matter how much patchwork I apply.
The best intentions will unravel and tatter in the blink of an eye,
and love will not heal everything it touches, or carry it to safety.

~ Maya Stein