Two Small Things

One written just before the new year, one shortly after. Hope you enjoy them. More to come in 2022.

THIS LIFE I LIVE
In the sun-poured winter afternoon
with someone not far away taking rickety hammer whacks on a not-in-a-hurry project,
the world and all its weary list of woes lurches along its heartbreaking path while I
am bathed in peace and a so soft afternoon breeze and ear-ringing silence 
in between the haphazard hammer smacks of the neighbor on the next block.

How can this life I live proceed this way – so graced and filled with comforts?

Ah!  This beautiful afternoon all by itself is a forgiveness 
of my enjoyment of its beauty and my good luck,
in spite of the world’s wild careening 
from one catastrophe to the next tragedy
and the hardship surely
just a few blocks down the street. 
So, thank you.
Thank you for this 
afternoon. Thank you.

Bill Jeffers
12/29/21

THE EASIEST THING
Finally – someone else’s weather’s come to visit – 
blow through for a few days and shut me up from my usual griping
about our single season – hot and hotter, humid and humider.
As if there weren’t any bigger problems out there to worry about.
As if there weren’t any bigger problems in here, sitting on the desk in my study
in their envelopes with their bills to be paid and filed away and how can this go on
without some bigger bank deposits or fewer envelopes muttering.

But it’s cold at last and I’m wearing gloves sitting outside writing 
and the sun is coming up. The birds are calling back and forth across a
beautiful pure blue sky, and if you walked through this fortunate neighborhood 
you would have to strain to imagine anything troubling anything wrong.
It would be the easiest thing to walk here assuming that every person inside every 
house was happy, that all the children had everything they could wish for 
and were much loved and treated kindly. And that all the grownups had good jobs
loved what they did, and loved each other, and never argued, never snarled or sulked,
never cheated, never struggled, never went astray.

You might know better if you thought about it – in a statistical way – 
that such a place would be unlikely – a paradise in fact – 
and you might then walk the same street, and pause before each house 
and see the adults inside with flaws and complex lives like yours, 
requiring risk and worry, journeys into unknown territory toward merely 
hoped for rewards requiring perseverance, determination, and hard work,
possibly resulting in good luck, success, and blessings; but also, surely sometimes 
disappointments, failures, betrayals, and lies – 
all the stuff of human imperfection and life lived.

Yet as you make your way along the street, you’ll see that somehow,
through our instinct to survive and our striving to do better,
there’s woven a desire to care for each other, and simply 
to be kind.

Bill Jeffers
1/4/2022