God Is In The Sock Drawer
A poem for when you’re losing hope in humans
I turn on the news, and once again,
the world feels like it’s on fire, all bitterness and lies
all heartache and scorched earth, people in power
preying on the fears of the ones who lack it, and
I wonder where we are supposed to find hope and why anger
has taken the microphone, and where are all the good people of the planet, and where is God in all this mess?
The washing machine dings, and I head down to the basement
to put away my family’s laundry: my husband’s bathing suit, my denim shorts, and my son’s tiny socks,
which are not so tiny anymore but still a quarter of the size
of the ones my husband wears.
And the jumble of the tiny next to the big and the adult socks
next to the kids takes my breath away. There are grass stains, and there
are dirt stains, and there is always a hole in someone’s toe,
and yet, the mess of it is somehow beautiful, and the mess of it
somehow reminds me of how lucky we are to have these socks,
to own this machine and to be able to hold one another.
