Michael Grinthal: I WAS WASHING AT NIGHT OUT IN THE YARD

Poetry by Michael Grinthal
I WAS WASHING AT NIGHT OUT IN THE YARD

Crying is excellent
Practicing

Look
How the geese

Honk and hiss and migrate
West. Blasphemous

Not false

Not even false
The sounds
I make

Are obstinate
Kinds of science.
Mistaken

Correctly for
Silence. Yes

And yes
And

Yes is

What crying
Is. Stop

Including me
Sky.

Michael Grinthal’s poems have appeared in Jubilat, The Los Angeles Review, Mudlark, Yes Poetry, Cleaver, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and has worked for 24 years as a community organizer and lawyer in the racial justice and tenants’ rights movements. Michael Grinthal has also worked for eleven years as a parent and fifty years as a child.