Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography. I highly recommend a new anthology called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, edited by James Crews and published by Green Writers Press in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Here's just one of the many fine poems, this one by Jeffrey Harrison, whose poetry we've published here before.
His most recent book is “Into Daylight” (Tupelo Press), in which this poem was originally published, and he makes his home in Massachusetts.
A Drink of Water
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age;
And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it's the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don't tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together across the bounds of death, and across time . . . as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds and entered this one through the kitchen faucet, my son and brother drinking the same water.
Ted Kooser. Photo credit: UNL Publications and Photography. I highly recommend a new anthology called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, edited by James Crews and published by Green Writers Press in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Here's just one of the many fine poems, this one by Jeffrey Harrison, whose poetry we've published here before.
His most recent book is “Into Daylight” (Tupelo Press), in which this poem was originally published, and he makes his home in Massachusetts.
A Drink of Water
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age;
And when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied, wipes the water dripping from his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it's the same casual gesture my brother used to make; and I don't tell him to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,
because I like remembering my brother when he was young, decades before anything went wrong, and I like the way my son becomes a little more my brother for a moment through this small habit born of a simple need,
which, natural and unprompted, ties them together across the bounds of death, and across time . . . as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds and entered this one through the kitchen faucet, my son and brother drinking the same water.
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