Making Molasses Cookies at Midnight (9/21/01)

My friend stirs and stares-

Into the warm brown morass,

Out into the thickening skies.

All over town, thunder plunges down

Our chimneys, rattling our spines.

We know it's just supercharged raindrops,

But we're thinking bombs, bombs, bombs.

Sleep is for peacetime, not for the wicked

Or even the innocent these first few nights.

And so my friend bakes cookies at midnight

Maybe because her body says "sweets"

And her hormones say "wake."

(She did not tell me why she baked.)

I like to imagine her birdie self sifting and stirring.

It comforts me as a sister insomniac to know someone's

Making better use of this wide-eyed fretful time than I;

That something that can never be bad can come of this.

Gay Davidson-Zielske

My Day After

I loved him today when he flung the front door open,

nearly breaking the picture hanging behind.

I loved him when he raked my brocade pillow

with buttery palms, though I've complained

about this habit since he learned to eat.

When he tossed his dirty socks, a hook shot,

onto the kitchen counter and knocked over

the vase of flowers, today, I rejoiced.

He was not the mother's son who made the final

cellphone call to say he loved her and that they were doomed.

He was not the young fireman whose body is forever entombed

beneath the moneychangers' tables in the temple of commerce.

When his father came home tired as ever and sank

into oblivion before TV, I loved him as never before.

When the same man wasn't really listening as I explained

my week's small blows, how could I care?

I loved them because they were in front of me--

messy and annoying and causing me to want to gripe.

And altogether human, unburned or torn--

victims only of the immense unpeeling of our sense

that anyone can ever again make everything all okay.

Norma Gay (Gay Davidson-Zielske) 9/12/01

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