Forgive me today for not doing anything particularly useful,
          I’ll do what I usually do when I feel particularly useless—

I’ll make something: a chicken stew, belated birthday card, a poem,
          if I’m lucky, and I’m usually able to squeeze some juice

from a hard lemon for my tea. I can’t fix the clogged drain, the front step,
          or I could, if I felt particularly called to, which is if it got really bad,

but no one will “get dead,” as my daughter says, from a slow drain.
          For weeks now, the doctor’s bill sits unpaid on the desk,

and I pray for a ceasefire a world away, scan the faces I see everywhere,
          be they animal or human for some glint of recognition.

How is it out there? I ask the sparrows huddled at the feeder.

I don’t understand their calls.
I don’t understand how the world doesn’t stop

on a dime to stop such immense suffering—that I went grocery shopping
          while someone else was shot waiting in a bread line,

and I, forgive me, but I grumbled about going at all.
          I can no longer start poems with “forgive me,”

though I’ve said it many times, most truthfully alone and in the dark,
          which is everywhere now and not, and as far as words go,

they may not be particularly useful, but they also aren’t useless,
          perhaps they point to a direction we’d like to be heading toward

but know we’ll come up short.

          From the middle of a war, there are brave poets sending out
their brave poems, mothers and grandmothers who weave blankets

to cover tanks, a pianist who recalls her piano’s keys from memory
          in exile, and a 5-year-old girl who sings Let It Go in a barely lit bunker.

We think of time as here and now but it scatters about us like seeds.

When my 5-year-old daughter asks me why I check my phone
          when we’re supposed to be coloring together, I say I’m sorry, love,

the news is bad, a string of words I fling like a curtain over a mirror
          as if it to say this world’s not ready yet—

if only later to fix like the step or the drain, if only now to beg for mercy,

for any shred of human decency to pin our shredded hopes upon.
All of it is useless. None of it is useless.

How to sit with grief and know what great luck.

Maybe this a guilt poem, a useless poem, a prayer poem,
          a poem with a safe-from-the-sidelines view, maybe all this is true—

sometimes we’re moved to make and sometimes we make to move.
          This calling drives me, drives me until it’s something, something,

there must be something more to give. I push the full weight of my arm
          into the lemon pinned beneath my palm. Forgive me, is there another way to mourn?