With all the heavy coverage from Gaza and Ukraine today, we could all use a poem selected by the wonderful Alice Quinn. Here’s “Happily Married” by Deborah Garrison:

Almost home
on the longest day of the year,
I saw two birds on a telephone wire:
two beaks, two sharp-peaked ruffs,
two tails that stuck down stiff
like two closed fans
all matched up neatly,
and against the faintly
yellow pre-dusk sky
the birds and wire
were all one color,
a fading black
or darkening gray.

Sometimes the smallest thing
brings harmony in
through the eye.
Or was it that I
on that particular day
had harmony to bring
to what I saw?
That I’d even looked up
seemed a piece of marital
good luck, and that they didn’t
move as I passed by—

I wondered how long in fact
they’d sit that way.

Two more poems from Garrison featured on the Dish here.

(From A Working Girl Can’t Win © 1998 by Deborah Garrison. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Photo by Armando Maynez)