Tapping me on the back, the night says,
“Don’t stay home.
Go look for what you lost yesterday.”
What I lost yesterday
resembles what I had lost the day before yesterday,
and what I lost the day before yesterday,
resembles what I had lost the day before that:
The backside of the board slipping down perpetually;
something that vanishes each time I go looking for it;
the nightly thirst while I’m walking along roads full of chuckholes
carrying an empty bag.
Perhaps it is something small.
Perhaps it is visible, perhaps invisible.
Perhaps it is something like a right.
I dream that the bag is too heavy for me to carry,
and when weightless morning comes I do it all over again.
Today I found
an utter stranger looking
for the same article that I had lost.
~ from What Have You Lost, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
(HarperCollins, 1999)
