This is where I am

The view from our front porch

 
So I'm sitting in the back of a golf cart just outside Lorraine's Cafe in Black Point, Exuma in The Bahamas doing our daily email check in with the outside world.

This week has been moment after moment of simply being present. 

This is Where I Am

A young black boy loses his hat
from the open bed of a pick-up truck
and I am grateful for his shrug and his smile
as the driver keeps driving. The hat
is a tan smudge on the washed-out road.
It will be there when the man
in the truck and the boy return.
In an hour or a day; it doesn't matter.
It will still be there. Up that same road,
a rooster reminds me it's morning,
though the sun woke me hours ago.
Yes, yes, I see the day, I want
to assure him, but he keeps crowing
and I am grateful for his joyous persistence.

My sister in law made me coffee
in the little pink cottage we are sharing
by the beach. We engage in
synchronized scratching and compare
mosquito bites, our ankles written
in bumps of insect braille. And I
am grateful for this sign of abundance
for the dragonflies who dance and dart
in the air above this wraparound porch
where I can see the waves lap the shore

and the baseball cap waiting for its head
and the half-empty coffee cup
and the rooster who won't shut up
and the dragonflies. Always the dragonflies.

--LJ Cohen, January 12, 2016

---

email:

• Free eBook
• Free/DRM-free short fiction
• publication news