Love Letters

We who are wedded to time
lounge on the beach. Gulls
sweep along the sand
carrying a message of depths.
They have salted their paths
in the brine of enduring secrets,
a source that the waves pounded
into a scattering of questions
and children shape into castles.
It clings to us all day and
as we leave, carrying it out
into the world, disperse it
like pollen. It’s what draws us
back to the shore of its mystery,
not to answer but simply to feel
what love there is in being asked.

The Only Where We Live

The only stair we take, winding down
into ourselves, one rib at a time inside
this citadel of flesh, these walls that ache,
tingle, and scooch into ripples at the merest
touch, a release of geese at the slight graze
or glance nearest to nothing but only the sound
of violins surging from a piece of music
like Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Or it could be
the return of stone pushing its way out,
what the kidney’s calcified of the remains
of beer and wine and the celebration of all
that passes over us, like weather and wonder,
a wave cutting the surface of us as the world
passes through and all its aethereal etchings,
like a tree troubled by wind or a river
flinging itself off the edge of its untidy bed
into a waterfall, and all that we are
flies out with it into arcs and spindrift,
suspended in air briefly before the plunge.

Had to Believe

How many ways can I learn what is hidden?
Can I learn what is hidden in so many ways,
or shredded or deleted, the documents,
the conversations in Washington offices
limiting the help my aging neighbor will
receive, a worker at McDonalds in his
golden years, or the single mom on the corner
considering still a third job because of
the rising cost of groceries, the rising cost
of medicine for her ailing son who likes
to sit at the window watching the birds
along the telephone wires like beads
on an abacus, especially when they take
to flight as if the addition and subtraction
could be tossed into the air and there’s
a chance that when it all comes down,
it could fall out in his favor and he would
have more time to spend with his mother,
and in sorting out those numbers, it might be
the reports will tell us not what we had
to believe but something useful like how to fly?

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, One Art, and Vox Populi.

Featured image in this post is, “Stairway To Hell” by Karmela Kortizija, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.