Meira Kerr-Jarrett
The Porch
The plants on my porch grow toward the light,
which pours into the window over a cityscape
of stone. We turn them to create a sense
of balance in the way their stems and leaves
are structured. Bless the green one
my daughter calls “Planty,” the orange
and red one my son reaches into again
and again, pulling fistfuls of dirt straight
into his widening mouth. In the early days
of coronavirus, in the early hours
of the morning, my husband prays on the porch,
wrapped in his tallis, black and white, and the long arm
of the spider plant keeps hitting him
in the face as he sways, barely missing the fern
that almost died when left in the sun
without much water. Bless all this life
that’s looking and looking for light, bless
this glass porch that lets us see a city at standstill.
From here it still looks the same as always.
—Submitted on 05/28/2020
Meira Kerr-Jarrett‘s poems have appeared in Apricity Press, Lumina, Rio Grande Review, and other journals. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and children.
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