Not Falling

I was listening to the news this morning and I felt like Henny Penny. The sky was falling.
Economies were cracking some more; candidates were slinging fresh mud and I switched stations before I could hear anything about crime.

They didn't mention the kid yesterday who held the door for the woman who had her hands full or the girl who finally hit the high note or the man who walked into his lab, closed the door, looked into the microscope and worked all afternoon toward an answer, toward a cure, like so many other afternoons before it. I didn't hear about the guy who took his bike on the train, got off the train and rode across many city blocks to get to the class he really liked.

So I kept the news off and read a poem, "Possibilities" by Wislawa Szymborska. At first it seemed like not much more than a list. As usual with a poem, I had to look again. I thought about it for a while and then I read another poem, "Ode to my Socks" by Pablo Neruda.

It was raining outside but the sky was washed in pale blue. And it wasn't falling.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-poems-4-e.html

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-my-socks/